Tilt - Softcover

Burns, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425195929 ISBN 13: 9780425195925

Publisher: Berkley, 2004

Synopsis

Which could also be the same as saying everything's impossible in this family. It's the tightrope I walk between the Irish knowledge that cookies always crumble, and the Midwestern fact that a sunny disposition can get you anywhere...

Bridget Fox's life is full of blessings, including her husband Pierce, a talented sculptor, and her two delightful daughters. But her elder daughter, Maeve, doesn't seem to be developing the way she's supposed to. She doesn't respond when she's called. She doesn't like to be touched, and the slightest disturbance sends her into a frenzy. Suddenly Bridget, who has plenty of experience with travel and art and sophisticated pleasures, is facing challenges she's never imagined. And as she copes with loss, change, and uncertainty-sometimes with nothing to hold on to but Maeve, and her sense of humor- she begins to find a strength she's never imagined...

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Burns is an award-winning poet. She has won the Academy of American Poets Award, the Foley Award, the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing and the Lenore Marshall Award for Prose and for Poetry as well. Elizabeth teaches writing, women's studies and writing seminars in St. Paul, Minnesota.

From Publishers Weekly:

The things that happen to Bridget Fox in this debut novel could make Job weep, but Bridget is funny on every page, and equally poignant. The overwhelming fact of Bridget's life is that her five-year-old daughter, Maeve, is autistic. Bridget describes what it's like to love a child when "she can't let you know she loves you back." Maeve wears a weighted vest to calm her and alternately giggles and moans to herself. She throws herself against a window and cracks it. This child would be too much for anyone, but Bridget has also suffered grievous losses: she divorced her philandering first husband and weathered the death of her beloved cousin. She and her current husband, Pierce, recently left their longtime home in Manhattan for Minneapolis, where Pierce, an internationally known sculptor, has a teaching job. Bridget has virtually no support system. Her father dies of cancer, her mother is chilly (she tells the desperate Bridget that she needs to find a good rinse for her graying hair). Pierce is soon diagnosed as manic-depressive. It's no wonder that Bridget tilts toward mental breakdown, but it is a wonder that she can be so engaging while coming unhinged-and that Burns manages to stave off melodrama with her dry wit and down-to-earth narration. Burns is a poet whose prose is lyrical, energetic and original. "We have crossed over into some world that I used to imagine was inhabited only by saints and martyrs, by mothers who grow patience like lizards grow tails." This hip and witty novel doesn't mince words about sex, mental illness or the exhaustion of child-rearing.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0425195929
• ISBN 13: 9780425195925
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 287