Awkward
A Detour
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- US$19.99
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- US$19.99
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Los Angeles Times Bestseller
“Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” —MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
“A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” —SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger
Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.
Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vivid collection from English professor Cappello (Night Bloom) is a rare and insightful series of meditations that takes readers to Russia, Italy and Australia, through the literary and cultural landscape, and into the uncomfortable corners of the human condition: "Why is there nothing more right, in terms of an image of awkwardness, than shoes on the wrong feet?" Titling each short essay with a single evocative word ("Spasmodic," "Untoward," "Tactless," "Jamesian"), the author finds more than 70 ways to approach her subject, from Emily Dickinson's "efforts to perfect an awkward idiom" to Capello's accidentally eating dog treats in Northern Italy. The huge range of experiences here prove endlessly fascinating, and her prose never loses its grace or delicacy, even as she suffers the embarrassment of a party faux pas: "a wringing of hands to the tune of the memory of my insensitive blurt." With keen skills of observation and careful attention to language, Capello has crafted an elegant illustration of her conclusion that "awkwardness isn't something to grow out of but to grow into."
