Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity (American Lives) - Hardcover

Brown, Fleda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803224761 ISBN 13: 9780803224766

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2010

Synopsis

All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet’s gift, into something more. This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman’s story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times.

 

A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless mother, a mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor: folded into Brown’s reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences of family and marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown’s telling rings with great humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.

About this title

About the Author

Fleda Brown, professor emerita at the University of Delaware and a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2007. Her many books include, most recently, On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers, coedited with Billie Travalini, and the award-winning poetry collection Reunion.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803224761
• ISBN 13: 9780803224766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 284