Friday, January 02, 2009

What is Joan Wickersham reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order.

Her entry begins:
I'm reading Great Expectations, for what I think is the fourth time. Of all the books I know, this one seems to expand the most with each re-reading. What I'm seeing this time is the perfect balance between self-delusion and self-awareness. You have patience with Pip's follies and vanities because...[read on]
Read reviews and an excerpt from The Suicide Index.

Among the praise for The Suicide Index:
[A] remarkable memoir... she exposes the whole messy territory of inheritance, of heritage, of what our families leave us, the treacherous trail of genetics and psychology and unhappiness, the legacy of all those generations as they play out in ways that we can see and ways that we will never see across the patterns of our lives. . . true in a way that transcends mere recollection ... [S]he arrives at an almost perfect balance, producing a survivor's story, a portrait of suicide from the outside, one that finds clarity in its inability to be clarified.
--David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Wickersham also wrote the novel The Paper Anniversary, and her fiction has appeared in magazines including AGNI, Glimmer Train, the Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. She has published essays in Glamour, Yankee, and the Boston Globe, and she has contributed and read on-air essays for National Public Radio’s On Point and Morning Edition.

Learn more about Joan Wickersham and her work at her website.

Writers Read: Joan Wickersham.

--Marshal Zeringue