Embalming Mom: Essays in Life (Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Burroway, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877457905 ISBN 13: 9780877457909

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2002

Synopsis

Janet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an early Mademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her textbook Writing Fiction, now in its fifth edition, is used in more than three hundred colleges and universities in the United States; a further text, Imaginative Writing, is due out in 2002. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

From Library Journal

As a young woman, novelist Burroway (The Buzzards; Raw Silk) was an early Mademoiselle guest editor in New York, a Barnard graduate who expected to use her education in child rearing, and a Cambridge student. Her struggles with her generation's conflicting impulses toward work and love are a reminder of prefeminist America. This collection of 16 essays opens with "I Didn't Know Sylvia Plath." Although their paths crossed repeatedly before Plath's suicide, Burroway never felt that she knew the poet. Yet they juggled the same issues, from writing aspirations to depressions, failed marriages, and the demands of young children. Burroway allows the reader intimate glimpses of her life as a child in Arizona; a student in the Northeast; a graduate student, newlywed, and young mother in England; and a divorced single parent, finding her path as a writer and professor in Florida. Alternately clever, humorous, lively, sad, and charming, her book is recommended for both public and academic libraries with large women's collections. [Embalming Mom is the inaugural volume in the University of Iowa Press's new "Sightline Books" series, dedicated to creative nonfiction. Ed.] Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0877457905
• ISBN 13: 9780877457909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 153