The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir - Softcover

Miner, Valerie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870136402 ISBN 13: 9780870136405

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 2002

Synopsis

"This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life," writes Valerie Miner in this elegant and compassionate account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. The Low Road explores location and dislocation in a large, poverty stricken Scottish family. Focusing on the life journeys of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, Miner searches for truth about family members, unveiling family secrets and missing histories. This powerful and moving memoir is a dramatic passage through poverty, immigration, and national and sexual identity. 
     Utterly engrossing, The Low Road navigates between family fable and fact as Miner leads us through her discoveries about back-street abortion and tuberculosis, orphanhood, exile, estrangement, and reconciliation to reach a place of acceptance and understanding.

About this title

About the Author:

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books, including Abundant Light, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, and Blood Sisters. She has been published in The Village Voice, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, and many other journals. Her stories and essays have appeared in more than fifty anthologies. She has won the 2005 McKnight Artist Fellowship; Valerie was a 2000 Fulbright Senior Scholar to India. She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has had Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia. Miner is Professor Emerita, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and is now an artist-in-residence and professor at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures and workshops. She lives in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California.

Review:

Miner... uses her investigative skills, her novelist's imagination, and her proven ability as an engaging storyteller... -- Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and Lifesaving: A Memoir

This is a richly imagined family history: beautifully written, deeply felt. -- Vivian Gornick, author of The End of the Novel of Love: Critical Essays and Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

Valerie Miner weaves together the lives of her grandparents, her mother and herself to create a passionate and engrossing memoir. -- Margot Livesey, author of The Missing World and Criminals

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0870136402
• ISBN 13: 9780870136405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 259