Embalming Mom: Essays in Life (Sightline Books) - Softcover

Burroway, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087745907X ISBN 13: 9780877459071

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2004

Synopsis

In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway weaves her way through the dangers of daily life - divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes, and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlights the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.

About this title

About the Author:

Janet Burroway is the author of eight novels, including The Buzzards and Raw Silk; two best-selling textbooks, Writing Fiction and Imaginative Writing; and the forthcoming memoir Losing Tim. She is also the author of numerous plays, short stories, poetry collections, and children’s books. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University and divides her time between Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Chicago.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 087745907X
• ISBN 13: 9780877459071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152