Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir - Hardcover

Skloot, Floyd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299299503 ISBN 13: 9780299299507

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Synopsis

One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot’s account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form.
            This intimate memoir—tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous—demonstrates Skloot’s considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning world prompt further musings on the forces of uncertainty, change, and displacement that have shaped him from childhood to late middle age, repeatedly knocking him awry, realigning his hopes and plans, even his perceptions. From the volatile forces of his mercurial, shape-shifting early years to his obsession with reading, acting, and writing, from the attack of vertigo to a trio of postvertigo (but nevertheless dizzying) journeys to Spain and England, and even to a place known only in his mother’s unhinged fantasies, Skloot makes sense of a life’s phantasmagoric unpredictability.

Finalist, Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards

About this title

About the Author

Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, essayist, poet, and novelist who lives in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the recipient of many awards, including three Pushcart Prizes and the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction. His writing has appeared in such distinguished magazines as the New York Times Magazine,Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, and American Scholar, and his eighteen books includeThe Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life. In 2010, Poets & Writers named him among 50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World.”

From Booklist

Skloot found the impetus for his latest inspiring memoir, after The Wink of the Zenith (2008), in the “attack of unrelenting vertigo” he experienced in 2009, a reactivation of a virus that targeted his brain 21 years earlier. Skloot first returns to his adolescence—a “mercurial, eruptive” place where he never felt firmly grounded, until realizing, in college, that he wanted to be a writer. In his customary offbeat and witty style, Skloot recounts his obsession with reading and writing, even sharing his ever-lengthening list of books he thinks he should read, including Sophie’s Choice. He draws the reader into his topsy-turvy world of vertigo as only a writer who has been a victim of its symptoms could: how it feels to live without balance and how constantly being off-kilter alienates you from the world, even from one’s home. Skloot’s refreshingly honest look at his illness ends on a hopeful note: he can now look back on those seemingly endless days of vertigo as a “weird and isolated” period in his life, but an experience about which he had to write. --Deborah Donovan

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0299299503
• ISBN 13: 9780299299507
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213