My Meteorite
Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
An expansive, radiant, and genre-defying investigation into bonding—and how we are shaped by forces we cannot fully know
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.
Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this astute debut memoir, told in a series of nonlinear vignettes, visual artist Dodge questions the seeming randomness of life. Dodge taps into philosophy, literary theory, film, language, and quantum theory, using his knowledge in these subjects as a prism through which to explore events from his life: the illness and death of his father, the discovery of his birth mother who placed him for adoption, life with his wife (Argonauts author Maggie Nelson) and children in Los Angeles, and preparing for an exhibition of his work. Dodge references science writer George Musser and explores what Musser calls "remote connectedness" a "sort of alchemy" that Dodge feels "manifests in the form of coincidences, correspondences, or simultaneities." For Dodge, it makes a sort of cosmic sense that decades after a high school trip to San Francisco, where he imagined meeting his birth mother in a bar called the Lost and Found, he finds out that she had indeed been a regular there. In a similar vein, a piece of a meteorite he ordered on eBay becomes a talisman to help him try to understand everything from environmental change to his father's Alzheimer's onset. Dodge's memoir of "yearning to reenchant the world" entertains and enlightens.
