The Mourner's Bestiary
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
A critically-acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.
Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.
A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.
The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.
"Beguiling, idiosyncratic [...] Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence." ? Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant judges citation
"Eiren Caffall has produced some of the most powerful writing on the ecological crisis I have read anywhere. Caffall is a gifted writer, and this book is strong medicine." ? Naomi Klein, author, social activist, and filmmaker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stunning and original debut, writer and musician Caffall draws links between hereditary illness and the fates of marine life in collapsing ecosystems. For 200 years, Caffall's family has passed down polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a chronic condition whose sufferers have an average life expectancy of 50 years. The author first learned of the "Caffall Curse" at nine years old, when the disease was starting to kill her father. At the same time, she was learning about the environmental decay affecting crabs and eels in the Long Island Sound, where her family often vacationed. In the present, a middle-aged Caffall reflects on her complicated feelings about parenthood, knowing she may have passed PKD on to her son. When the two of them take a trip to an island off the coast of Maine, Caffall has a seizure. After being rescued by the Coast Guard, she reflects on the algae threatening lobster and humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine, which gives the animals symptoms similar to those brought on by PKD. While the memoir's conceit might feel forced in lesser hands, Caffall brilliantly parallels her family's suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership.
