In the Rhododendrons
A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf
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- 13,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners' Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Christle's mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
Her private, British mother's revelation - a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship - propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England's sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's 'birthday hill' in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother's story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and memoirist Christle (The Crying Book) delves into her relationship with her mother and the work of Virginia Woolf in this dazzling account. Raised in New Hampshire by a buttoned-up English mother and an American father in the merchant marines, Christle returned to England with her mother in 1995 for her grandfather's funeral. During that trip, a teenage Christle was sexually assaulted in the alley behind a London nightclub. In the aftermath, she acted out to gain mother's attention, but her mother only withdrew further; years later, Christle's mother revealed that she was molested as a child. Returning to England in the years after her assault, Christle visited key locations in her own family history and the life of Virginia Woolf—who lived in the same part of London as Christle's mother—in an effort to plunge "behind the rhododendrons" like Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway so she could better understand her mother. With lyrical prose ("If a sign's words remain the same, their meaning can shift, the letters cracking enough to let us inside and rearrange what was thought to be settled"), a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt. Photos.
