Plain Text - Hardcover

Mairs, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816508925 ISBN 13: 9780816508921

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 1986

Synopsis

"The difficulties and despairs through which she has passed have left Nancy Mairs with unique and moving stories to convey, as well as with a strong voice to tell them." —New York Times Book Review

"These striking essays by Nancy Mairs are so touching and heartbreakingly honest that one often has to put the book down and rest emotionally before reading on. . . . Readable and compelling, written with intimacy . . . and a swagger." —San Francisco Chronicle

"The lugubriousness and self-pity which one might expect to surround these subjects is absent. The prose is cool and the wit as dry as sundown in Mairs' Arizona desert, the jokes as witty as the bright pink flowers on my spiny cactus." —Women's Review of Books

About this title

Review

In lucid, forthright essays, Nancy Mairs examines acute anxiety, suicidal depression, and the physical realities of coping with multiple sclerosis. She also writes about what she loves and what she has learned: "I am wounded easily, but I am just as easily delighted." Since the rigors of MS and agoraphobia make many of life's usual "adventures" impossible for her, Nancy Mairs redefines adventure within her own parameters, not by what one does but by the passion or thoroughness with which one does it. Her feminism, like her sense of adventure, begins in personal experience and extends to something larger than the plain details. Describing her stay in a psychiatric hospital as a young mother, she recounts each agonizing step of her survival (not "recovery") and relates this experience to the "madwoman" paradigm that haunts women who have confronted raw frustration and existential panic. And while she hates her physical limitations and refuses to be defined by them, she is determined to expand her outlook even through the experience of being "crippled" (the word she chooses to use). Her struggles are heated in the crucible of her empathy "in searching for and shaping a stable core in a life wrenched by change and loss ... I must recognize the same process ... in the lives around me." This writer teaches, by her living and working example, the ways we may incorporate and transform the obstacles in our lives. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom

From Publishers Weekly

Five essays in Mairs's collection have been previously published in magazines. The other seven are originals that will speak clearly to the hearts of women in ambiguous positions as society dictates changes in traditional roles. A wife and the mother of two grown children, the author reveals intimate information about her life, personal and professional. Although she is afflicted by multiple sclerosis, Mairs, who lives in Arizona, copes with her job as a teacher and writer, in ways she describes in "On Being a Cripple." Sparing herself little, she reveals crises that drove her to attempt suicide, the battles against the clinical depression that hospitalized her, and other periods of serious danger. It's clear that work and a keen wit are Mairs's strongest allies. She can laugh at her own fumbling methods of surviving. The author's convictions are stated in "A Letter to Matthew," her son. She counsels him to reject the values that determine the attitude of elderly men toward women. Matthew, she writes, is young enough to change.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0816508925
• ISBN 13: 9780816508921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 154