Angels and Aliens: A Journey West - Hardcover

Morris, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031219949X ISBN 13: 9780312199494

Publisher: Picador, 1998

Synopsis

Angels & Aliens is Mary Morris's long-awaited memoir, confirming her status as a master of the genre.

In Angels & Aliens, Mary Morris once again explores her experiences as a woman on the road, this time as a single parent, wandering with her daughter through Southern California and struggling to make it on her own. Posing as a believer, Morris infiltrates New Age groups, flies as an angel through the Crystal Cathedral, and becomes a member of the earth-based unit of the Ashtar command.

As her relationship with her baby's father unravels and she is confronted with personal and financial setbacks, Morris tries to understand how other people cope with their lives, and places these systems of coping withing the broader context of American culture.

Written with humor and hope, this travel memoir is both a life-affirming story of one woman's journey through the emotional terrain of the heart, and a clear-eyed journalist's account of the true nature of California as a state of exodus, home to sun seekers, spiritual believers, and cults. Combining her gift as a story teller, which is apparent in her fiction, and the powerful sense of place she brings to her nonfiction, Morris gives us a traveler's tale for the millennium when there's no place to go but up.

About this title

Review:

Following the effective formula she established in her classic memoir Nothing to Declare, Mary Morris mingles travel in an exotic landscape--well, Southern California is exotic if you're from New York City by way of suburban Chicago--with memories of a troubled past and a frank description of current personal difficulties. In Angels & Aliens, Morris moves to Orange County in 1988 with her infant daughter, Kate, whose father has remained behind on the East Coast, unwilling either to marry Morris or let her go. As is often the case with one-sided accounts of relationships on the rocks, it's hard to imagine what the author sees in her selfish, controlling lover; most readers will cheer when she finally forces him to lay his emotional and financial cards on the table. Her account of life in La-La Land has predictable moments (freeway driving as existential statement, crystal-wielding massage therapists), but Morris is surprisingly nonjudgmental about oddball cults like the Crystal Cathedral, which flies six parishioners/angels overhead in its annual Christmas pageant, and Uforum, which runs a support group for people convinced they have been abducted by aliens. No matter how strange the behavior, Morris's sharp, stripped-down language makes it recognizably human. --Wendy Smith

From the Publisher:

"Mary Morris combines a hunger for transcendence with wry self-mockery. Her subtle, unobtrusive craft beautifully stitches together past and present, hope and disenchantment, insight and narrative." --Phillip Lopate

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 031219949X
• ISBN 13: 9780312199494
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304