What is Hope Edelman reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Hope Edelman, author of The Possibility of Everything, her first full-length memoir, and other works.

Her entry begins:

I recently finished Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis. It’s a series of interlocking short stories set in New York City in the 1970s and captures the complexity and angst and longing of adolescent girlhood like no other book I can recall. The drama centers around Leah, the quirky, red-headed daughter of Helen, a staid, conservative interior designer-in-training. Leah is mercilessly picked on at her private middle school and left to navigate the social jungle alone, save for her best friend, Oleander, who lives in semi-squalor with a dreamy mother and a precocious older sister. All of the secondary characters are colorful and multi-dimensional and the dialogue is spot-on throughout. Rarely do I read a book that immediately compels me to work harder to become a better writer, but this one...[read on]

Hope Edelman is the author of five nonfiction books, including the international bestseller Motherless Daughters (1994), which was translated into seven languages; Letters from Motherless Daughters (1995), an edited collection of letters from readers; Mother of My Mother (1999), which looks at the depth and influence of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship; and Motherless Mothers (2006), about the experience of being a mother when you don't have one. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, she has published articles, essays, and reviews in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Among the early praise for The Possibility of Everything:

"I’ve been a fan of Hope Edelman’s since reading her book, Motherless Daughters, and waited with great anticipation for her first memoir. It was well worth the wait.... The writing is smart and striking beyond belief. I found myself, literally, transported."
--Monica Holloway

"On a family trip to Belize, Hope Edelman confronts the very heart of darkness only to be ambushed by the healing hope of things unseen. Edelman writes like a dream and like a dreamer, with a novelist's rhythm and a journalist's unsparing eye. The Possibility of Everything kept me gasping and turning pages, awed by Edelman's unwillingness to compromise the truth. This book makes everything seem possible-except putting it down."
--Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

Visit Hope Edelman's website and blog.

Writers Read: Hope Edelman.

--Marshal Zeringue