The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress

"In Nadelson’s memoir, readers find a skilled writer whose introspection into his insecurities endears him to his readers and presents a fine example of memoir writing that is immediate, honest, visceral, and altogether a pleasure to read." —Girija Sankar, New Pages

Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson's life fell apart. His fiancee left him a month before their planned wedding for another woman who made her living performing as a drag king. He moved into a drafty attic. His car's brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he'd struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances.

The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man's halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating—some self-lacerating—they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear.

With humor and unflinching honesty, Scott Nadelson scrutinizes his life to discover who he is and finds just how elusive such a discovery can be. To read the resulting book is to join him on a personal journey that is thoughtful, surprising, occasionally hilarious, and unapologetically human.

SCOTT NADELSON is the author of three story collections published by Hawthorne, including Aftermath and The Cantor's Daughter. A winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction, the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, he teaches creative writing at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Salem, Oregon.