MINNEAPOLIS

Toby Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of her family, has opened a summer residence program in the Nebraska Sandhills for the wounded and broken, misfits and dreamers. Besides her guests--a minister on sabbatical and a woman recovering from cancer treatment--Toby is joined by Anita and Luís, her hired help; Anita's brother Gabe; and someone Toby least expected, her nearly estranged daughter, Nola Jean. Mother-daughter tensions, age-old prejudices, and generational divides challenge the members of this disparate community as they bump up against each other. Parallel conflicts occur against the backdrop of a changing rural landscape where history clashes with evolving mores. In this thoughtful and moving novel Pamela Carter Joern probes the complications of family relationships, identity, belonging, and the impact of long-held secrets.

With the growing urgency of questions about how to claim identity and achieve authenticity, life-writing started to acquire an unprecedented cultural importance. A range of social and economic developments, from the publishing boom in memoir writing to the rise of the internet, transformed the possibilities for self-expression. By the end of the timespan covered in this book life-writing was no longer something done mainly by important individuals who wrote their autobiography, or by sensitive souls who kept a diary. It became a truly ubiquitous phenomenon, part and parcel of the everyday formation of selfhood. Considering a diverse range of texts from across the English-speaking world, this volume places life-writing in relation to wider debates about the sociology and philosophy of modern identity, and the changing marketplace of publishing and bookselling. Yet in doing so it seeks above all to credit the extraordinary literary inventiveness which the pursuit of self-knowledge inspired in this period. Major subjects addressed include: the aftermath of World War II, including responses to the Holocaust; the impact of psychoanalysis on biography; autofiction, autrebiography, and changing ideas about authentic self-knowledge; coming out memoirs and the transformation of sexual identity; feminist exemplary writing and lyric poetry; multilingualism and intercultural life-writing; the memoir boom and the decline of intimacy; testimony narrative and memory culture; posthumanism in theory and practice; literary biography as an alternative to literary theory; literary celebrity and its consequences for literature; social media and digital life-writing.

Margaret Atwood's novels are photographs of her characters' lives: while words only ever describe her protagonists’ blurred visions of their pasts, their 'true' stories are told in subtexts which run parallel or even contrary to the main story line and which depict the unseen, the buried, the 'untrue'. Replete with intertextual references, her fiction illuminates that and why "[w]hat isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light" (The Blind Assassin). She plays with our conventional modes of perception to make us aware of the way we frame reality in our minds. Andrea Strolz discusses in her book the interrelation between metafictional and intertextual features in two of Atwood's novels that share many similarities, even though written in different decades. She examines how Atwood weaves intertextual references into her fiction, how she facilitates a reader's recognition of the intertexts, and she shows that Atwood's narrator-protagonists also reflect on our age as one of intertextuality.

"Fred Holly, the oldest of four children, begins his senior year in high school while he works part-time at the local Omaha art museum, a place where he can get lost for hours in the beauty before him. At the museum, Fred escapes his father's worries about the Vietnam War, the draft, and the changes that are roiling America. As fall progresses, James Day, Fred's best friend, begins spending most of his time with his male debate coach and Fred can't help but feel the strange pangs of jealousy. Soon thereafter, Charlotte, Fred's precocious eleven-year-old sister, is admitted to the hospital with kidney problems. As Charlotte's condition worsens and the likelihood of her coming home decreases, the Hollys lives descend into sadness. And only their dreams can hope to inspire their days."--BOOK JACKET.