Items related to Worlds Beyond My Control

Lazarre, Jane Worlds Beyond My Control ISBN 13: 9781891305542

Worlds Beyond My Control - Softcover

 
9781891305542: Worlds Beyond My Control
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Julia, a professor of creative writing and a writer as well as the mother of two young black sons and the wife of an African American man, wrestles with a loss of control as her sons grow toward the point of leaving home. Their leaving is complicated by racial tensions in their city and by Julia’s growing sense of loss of self. The novel follows Julia’s odyssey through a sometimes violently conflicted world, while at the same time interrogating the forms of fiction, autobiography and memoir. In the end, loss of control is combined with what remains of her sense of power and identity as a mother and a writer.
 

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From Publishers Weekly:
Autobiographical fiction, her forte, again serves Lazarre well in this latest effort, after The Mother Knot. Having last explored the complexities of maternal emotions, Lazarre here uses her alter ego, Julia, to explore the two forces that dominate her life, the conflicting demands of motherhood and a writing career. For Julia, a white woman married to a black man, motherhood has meant a ceaseless struggle to protect her two sons, to keep them safe from the world as well as from her own tempestuous moods, and finally, when they are grown, to let them go. Lazarre explores two problems: the mother's relationship with her children, and the writer's relationship with her friend Martha, details of whose life Julia incorporates in her fiction. Accusing her of being a mediocre writer, Martha says "Real artists make things up." Lazarre/Julia uses autobiography not to tell what happened but to make sense of it, to find her place in the world by writing her way out of the web of her conflicting desires. The person Julia actually is, the person she wishes to become by an act of will, and the person she chooses to be in her fiction converge, in this compelling novel, to give a multifaceted view of a contemporary woman's life.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal:
Lazarre is a powerful writer whose intense prose describes her emotional life with frightening honesty. This autobiographical novel is actually a series of short stories about a woman writer, Julia, coming to terms with midlife changes--her distance from her husband, the betrayal of a friend (or is it the other way around?), the struggle to continue writing. But mostly Julia watches her two growing sons, black like their father, and explores her feelings as a mother who must learn to let go. Lazarre refuses to simplify relationships or emotional contradictions, yet cares passionately for clarity of thought and sentence. She layers memoir with fiction, creating a structural complexity that mirrors the conflicts and surprises of Julia's internal life. A penetrating, sensitive work of literature that is a worthy successor to The Mother Knot (Beacon Pr., 1986).
-Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. Libs.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherPainted Leaf Pr
  • ISBN 10 1891305549
  • ISBN 13 9781891305542
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages176

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780990376750: Worlds Beyond My Control

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780990376750
Publisher: Hamilton Stone Editions, 2017
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9780525249764: Worlds beyond My Control

Dutton, 1991
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