My Little Donkey
And Other Essays
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A collection of searching, curious, and surprising essays catalyzed by the author's move in her sixties to a small Italian village, exploring selfhood, coincidence, inheritance, and the impermanence of identity
In 2021, in her mid-sixties, Martha Cooley moved with her husband from the United States to Castiglione del Terziere, a village in northernmost Tuscany. Prompted by this relocation, the essays in My Little Donkey chronicle her encounters with people, animals, the past, and herself as she reckons with the fallout of a major life-change.
Following curiosity where it leads, Cooley delves into music and silence, the vagaries of history, the complexity of familial legacies, and the presence and power of animals in human lives. With its spirited examinations of uncanny coincidences and chance events, My Little Donkey’s varied essays offer the vivid pleasures of story combined with the provocations of a writer looking behind the curtain of appearances, intent on honest assessments of what she sees and feels. Whimsical yet at the same time intellectually and emotionally bold, these essays tackle the conundrum of time’s passage: how to adapt, pay attention, embrace contradiction, and enjoy the ride?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this elegant volume, novelist Cooley (The Archivist) reflects on her late-in-life move to Italy. After retiring from a long career as a literature professor in New York City in her mid-60s, Cooley and her husband—an Italian native—immigrated to Castigllione del Terziere, a tiny village in northern Tuscany. Cooley was immediately pulled in several directions, struggling with her new residence in an unknown country and the end of her career while staggered by the natural beauty all around her. As she incisively catalogs her cultural vertigo, she starts to broaden her lens, exploring the history of a catastrophic landslide in northeastern Italy in 1963, recalling 10 years of piano lessons she took with a troubled Russian émigré, and enumerating the difficulties of caring for her late, dementia-stricken father, who once accidentally threw away her mother's ashes ("It's so bad you almost have to laugh," she writes). Though the wide angle could be a problem in lesser hands, Cooley's wit and wisdom infuses even the most mundane subjects with wonder. Readers who've undergone their own rocky life transitions will be especially enchanted.
