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The Riddle Song
and Other Rememberings
In this ensemble of interrelated essays, writer and poet Rebecca McClanahan weaves together threads of stories and common experiences to create a meditation on family life. She explores the familiar rituals, the shared dreams, and the guarded secrets that tie family together as she unravels the mysteries behind familial relationships. Throughout, McClanahan seeks to identify what it means to be an individual within the context of kinship and unexpected connections. Besides navigating her own emotional landscape and her family's, McClanahan revisits the physical places of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She takes us to the military bases where her father and husband were stationed, to the cemeteries she loved as both child and adult, and to the various hospitals and homes that served as backdrops for family crises and celebrations. She also considers the meaning of losses--the loss of a child, a family home, and a family pet, and a lost chance at motherhood. Partly fashioned around the lines of the folk tune "The Riddle Song," The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings captures the palpable bonds that exist between mothers, daughters, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and grandparents.
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"A dazzling first book of personal essays
. . . each one so sensitively (and sensuously) rooted in actual
existence that I continually had to remind myself that I was reading
about someone's life, not living it myself. Writing rarely gets
this emotionally real." |
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