Bia Lowe’s Splendored Thing is a memoir and a paean to love told in a series of exquisitely written personal essays that follow one woman’s understanding of love, from childhood’s gentle adventures to adulthood’s stormy affairs. Author of the critically acclaimed Wild Ride, Lowe is an award-winning writer who knows that there is more truth in a good metaphor than in a thousand tiny details, and she draws on everything from Sara Lee™ baked goods and fairy tales to maps and stars to limn love in its myriad forms. She writes of her mother, the person from whom she learned loving; the object of her affection, through whom she continues to define and redefine love; and of other kinds of loving: love for a landscape, a house, a snail, a boy. Bia Lowe’s writing calls to mind the best of Joan Didion, Walt Whitman, and Lewis Thomas. But like all great writers, her work is breathtakingly original, and Splendored Thing is a unique book that takes us through the life and loves of a woman who finds joy, sorrow, and, ultimately, wonder in both.

Reviews

The author of 1995's acclaimed Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills muses here on ordinary objects (mouths, roses, apples), familiar activities (falling, map reading, kissing) and traditional tales (Hansel and Gretel, the Three Bears, Rapunzel), offering commentaries that balloon like cotton candy, at first airy, then becoming dense. In these 15 genre-bending meditations, Lowe takes readers on a random-yet exhilarating-ride, toting along ideas from such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, James Baldwin, Helen Keller, Barbara McClintock and Roger Williams. Her voice is alternately impious, impish, sensuous, witty, probing and altogether passionate. The central theme is love, admittedly a "troublesome enterprise," but one that permeates many aspects of Lowe's life-she is in love with women, in love with words ("metaphor has more truth than details ever could"), and even in love with love itself. She examines love and conflict via a prism of examples, among them engaging in sexual behavior with a classmate when she was a young girl, pursuing cows gone loose in Ireland, sharing homemade lamb stew with new friends and responding to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Abstract as the essays can be, Lowe's love for "Rose, the pseudonymous woman, object of this valentine" and her measured compassion for her mother are fully concrete. She delightfully shares personal and historical anecdotes, all the while reflecting on the tremendous powers of love and fear.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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