For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this collection about life as a twentysomething in the twenty–first century, Kathleen Rooney writes with the finesse of someone well beyond her years, but with fresh insights that reveal a girl still making discoveries at every turn. Varied and original, the tales in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs recount the perils of falling in love with the unlikeliest of people, of visiting the New York apartments of a vanished poet, and of touring an animal retirement home with her parents. Of getting a Brazilian wax, and of chauffeuring a U.S. senator around town. Of saying good–bye to a cousin who's joining a convent, and of trying to convince herself that she's not wasting her life. This is a book about love and longing, poetry and plagiarism, death and democracy, mountain floods and Midwestern cicadas. Here is a young woman struggling to find her place as an adult and a citizen in an America that rarely manages to live up to Whitman's dream of it. With this book, Rooney sings—yes, in fact, she trills—loud and clear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this smart, subtly honed set of 11 autobiographical essays, Rooney, a 20-something Chicago native, teacher of writing, and U.S. Senate aide, seems poised for a really good revelation but never quite delivers. Riffing on subjects as diverse as getting a Brazilian bikini wax on the eve of her marriage ("a huge gender betrayal" for this self-described feminist); making a pilgrimage to the sites inhabited by a favorite poet, Weldon Kees, in New York City; and feeling pleased by the flirtations of her students at a small religious college in Washington State, the author chronicles the years of her early professional youth as she and her novelist husband move from job to job, from Chicago to Tacoma, Wash., and back. Rooney is well read and has a wily, understated style, as she describes her Christian parents; trying to teach her younger Senate interns how to execute metaphors and good manners; and resisting the urge to go from being a "fun-time happy party girl" drinking with guy friends at McSorley's Ale House in New York City to being a "total bitch" when having to complain of a man's drunken importunate groping. The last, and most substantial, essay, involving her cousin Jennifer's decision to become a nun, underscores the author's overall longing to attain a validated life, rooted in mission and meaning. But in the end, the essays leave the reader hungry for more substance.
