Book of Days
Personal Essays
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The sexual politics of a faculty wives dinner. The psychological gamesmanship of an inappropriate therapist. The emotional minefield of an extended family wedding . . .
Whatever the subject, Emily Fox Gordon’s disarmingly personal essays are an art form unto themselves—reflecting and revealing, like mirrors in a maze, the seemingly endless ways a woman can lose herself in the modern world. With piercing humor and merciless precision, Gordon zigzags her way through “the unevolved paradise” of academia, with its dying breeds of bohemians, adulterers, and flirts, then stumbles through the perils and pleasures of psychotherapy, hoping to find a narrative for her life. Along the way, she encounters textbook feminists, partying philosophers, perfectionist moms, and an unlikely kinship with Kafka—in a brilliant collection of essays that challenge our sacred institutions, defy our expectations, and define our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After publishing two memoirs (Mockingbird Years; Are You Happy?) and a novel (It Will Come To Me), Gordon claims the personal essay as her chosen m tier. "What I seem to want to do is not to have experiences but to think and tell about them," Gordon asserts. Touching on several subjects her childhood as a "faculty brat," her experiences in therapy, her husband's colonoscopy, a niece's wedding, and a conference of philosophers among them this collection is self-absorbed and tedious. For example, the author shares a few pages of random notes jotted at the conference ("A guy with a canvas Brentano bag, looking dyspeptic and confused "), but fails to derive any meaning, or even much humor, from her musings. Her combative but successful marriage and her "sense of exclusion" provide repetitive fodder for rumination, while extraordinary events in her life, such as an illegal abortion and being raped, are given only glancing looks. Gordon's "thinking aloud" makes the reader feel superfluous.
