The Object Parade
Essays
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell?
In recalling her experience, Dinah's essays each begin with one thing — real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the gifted watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth's love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream.
Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of moving to Los Angeles and raising a family; of coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with up–ended notions about home and family and career and aging, too. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pleasant if meandering essay collection, actress and writer Lenney (Bigger Than Life) meditates on dozens of memorable physical objects from her life: her grandfather's Steinway; a pair of her mother's earrings; the plastic scoops found in old tins of Chock Full o' Nuts coffee, and others. Much of the collection revolves around family, specifically the author's husband, children, and mother; the results are charming but repetitive in their patterns of ambiguous melancholy and joy, as one essay fades into the next. However, the book offers a few heart-stopping standouts, particularly "Stick Kite" and "Nests," which go to a deeper level of emotion and truth. The former, a two-page monologue to Lenney's daughter as a child flying a kite, is intimate and vivid, while the latter is a spare, beautiful weaving of her sister's troubled life and the families of doves that sing outside of the author's bedroom. The book is most successful when the author focuses more on the people in front of her and lays scenes and emotions bare, as opposed to indulging in the grand-mystery-of-life thoughts that permeate some of the weaker essays. Still, this creatively structured book remains an enjoyable read, and the standout essays merit the price of admission.
