I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place - Hardcover

Norman, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0547385420 ISBN 13: 9780547385426

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

Synopsis

“A bracing and no-nonsense memoir, infused with fresh takes on love, death, and human nature.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

As with many of us, the life of acclaimed novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of “arresting strangeness.” Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman’s story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. In the Arctic, he receives news over the radio that “John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” And years later, in Washington, D.C., another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. Norman’s story is also stitched together with moments of uncanny solace. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse Norman writes, “Everything I love most happens most every day.”

In the hands of Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter, life’s arresting strangeness is made into a profound, creative, and redemptive memoir.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"A brother on the lam, the sighting of a Confederate ghost during a high fever, a therapist’s flat tire—the events of a single episode of Howard Norman’s superb memoir are both on the edge of chaos and gathered superbly into coherent meaning. He catches, as indelibly as Frank Conroy in Stop-Time, the craziness of youth: "It was about this time I started writing letters to other people’s fathers." And then, in the culminating chapter, Norman stuns us with his telling of the heartbreaking event that invades his home and life. A wise, riskily written, beautiful book." — Michael Ondaatje, author of Running in the Family, Anil’s Ghost, and The Cat’s Table

About the Author:

HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were both nominated for National Book Awards. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, What Is Left the Daughter,Next Life Might Be Kinder, and My Darling Detective. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0547385420
• ISBN 13: 9780547385426
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208