The Secret Life of Objects

Selected by O, The Oprah Magazine: * Best Memoirs * Best Beach Reads * Best First Lines * Top Books to Pick Up Now

** A Wall Street Journal Bestseller **

MORE PRAISE FOR THE SECRET LIFE OF OBJECTS

“Her gift for capturing the nugget of a relationship in a single backward glance works beautifully in this illustrated memoir.”– The Chicago Tribune

“The Secret Life of Objects is a lean, brilliant, playful memoir.”– The San Francisco Chronicle

“Her memoir reflects on everyday objects such as a cup, a ring… From these memories comes a whole life story.”– Reader’s Digest

“A unique, evocative memoir…written with all the wild bloom of imagination that fiction brings to the table.”– The Quivering Pen

“This endearing memoir takes an assortment of otherwise ordinary possessions and turns it into a series of delicate, resonant stories.”– More Magazine

“’Sometimes things shatter,’ Dawn Raffel writes in The Secret Life of Objects. ‘More often they just fade.’ But in this evocative memoir, moments from the past do not fade—they breathe on the page, rendering a striking portrait of a woman through her connections to the people she’s loved, the places she been, what’s been lost, and what remains. In clear, beautiful prose, Raffel reveals the haunting qualities of the objects we gather, as well as the sustaining and elusive nature of memory itself.”– Samuel Ligon, author of Drift and Swerve: Stories

“Dawn Raffel puts memories, people and secrets together like perfectly set gems in these shimmering stories, which are a delight to read. Every detail is exquisite, every character beautifully observed, and every object becomes sacred in her kind, capable hands. I savored every word.– Priscilla Warner, author of Learning to Breathe – My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

Dawn Raffel is the author of a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her fiction has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Quarterly, NOON, and many others. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, and at Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal and St. Petersburg, Russia. She is an editor at large for Reader's Digest, and the editor of The Literarian, the online journal for the Center for Fiction.