Customer Reviews

Book of Days: Personal Essays

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Emily Fox Gordon's keen, insightful personal essays, originally published in distinguished literary journals such as Boulevard and The American Scholar, are now gathered in an illuminating collection that could stand as a third memoir. Fans of Are You Happy: A Childhood Remembered and Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy will discover here a kind of narrative thread that moves past Gordon's ambivalent years on the therapist's couch to the present day, in which she registers both comfort in an enduring, intellectually charged marriage and an ongoing quest for depth and discernment in her hard-won, fully deserved writing life. The title essay, a response to the publication of Mockingbird Years, is a must-read for all writers and readers of the memoir. (Mockingbird Years, the essay from which the memoir was developed, is included in this collection, as well.) But to flat-out label the collection a memoir, or a sequel, would be inaccurate and diminishing. Each wholly satisfying essay glows and bristles pleasingly on its own, offspring of a vigorous, stretching mind with a sly eye for the comic. It's no exaggeration to say that Emily Fox Gordon is one of the finest personal essayists writing today.

Emily Fox Gordon's voice is funny, astringent, palpable. She sometimes turns an eviscerating eye on others, but most of the time it is turned on herself. This is one of those truly great books of essays--like the wonderful *Boys of My Youth* by JoAnn Beard--that manages to be an autobiography at the same time. I read it in a day because I couldn't put it down.