Pure Flame
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A searing work of cultural memoir, Michelle Orange’s Pure Flame explores the meaning of maternal legacy―in her own family and across a century of seismic change.
In a series of texts with her mother, Michelle Orange learned about the existence of Janis Jerome, who, it turns out, is one of her mother’s many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her mother’s midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called “the great unwritten story”: that of the mother-daughter bond.
The death of Orange’s maternal grandmother at nearly ninety-six and the fear that her mother’s more “successful” life will not be as long bring new urgency to her questions about the woman whose absence and anger helped shape her life. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it. Told with warmth and rigor, Orange’s account of her mother’s life and their relationship is pressurized in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in an essential, revelatory meditation on becoming, selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother’s daughter now.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
What’s more powerful than the bond between mother and daughter? Sometimes, it’s the lack thereof. In this deeply moving memoir-nonfiction hybrid, essayist Michelle Orange digs into the details of why her mother, Jackie, left the family when she was a young girl. As she sifts through the past, Orange masterfully connects the dots between her mother’s choice and the massively important social and cultural issues that led to it. We were moved by Orange’s intensely personal journey and totally intrigued by the feminist lens she presents it through. She even includes fascinating passages from the works of her feminist heroes like Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, and Simone de Beauvoir in which they discuss how they were each shaped by their own relationships with their mothers. Pure Flame is a beautifully compelling look at the changing role of motherhood in one woman’s life and in the entire 20th century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The societal pressures and internal forces that shape a woman's identity drive this often brilliant, but occasionally mired, cultural memoir by Orange (This Is Running for Your Life) that's laced with ruminations on gender, feminism, and self-determination. Throughout, she draws on quotes by Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Hardwick, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sontag, but the narrative's spine is Orange's fragile relationship with her prickly mother. ("Mother-daughter relationships are generally catastrophic," according to Beauvoir). An unhappy 1970s Canadian housewife, Orange's mother took a job at a bank, where for branch promotions "they had her bake cakes," as Orange wincingly recalls, and "she would dress in a clown costume... willing to make a fool of herself." Within a decade she earned an MBA, became v-p of a financial services company, and, emotionally speaking, was "already gone," having learned "to bend the tricks of men" toward her own career ambitions. Yet she also hid a chronic, ultimately terminal lung condition, which Orange only discovered when her mother was in her 70s and approaching death. Their formerly distant relationship grew closer over lengthy text exchanges, reproduced here as if poems. Orange's unsentimental language balances poignancy and intellectualism, though her analysis tends to go on a bit too long. At its heart, this is an affecting mother-daughter saga.
