Embalming Mom: Essays in Life (Sightline Books) [Paperback]

Janet Burroway (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sightline Books | Publication Date: September 1, 2004

In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life—divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother’s ashes, and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlights the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

As a young woman, novelist Burroway (The Buzzards; Raw Silk) was an early Mademoiselle guest editor in New York, a Barnard graduate who expected to use her education in child rearing, and a Cambridge student. Her struggles with her generation's conflicting impulses toward work and love are a reminder of prefeminist America. This collection of 16 essays opens with "I Didn't Know Sylvia Plath." Although their paths crossed repeatedly before Plath's suicide, Burroway never felt that she knew the poet. Yet they juggled the same issues, from writing aspirations to depressions, failed marriages, and the demands of young children. Burroway allows the reader intimate glimpses of her life as a child in Arizona; a student in the Northeast; a graduate student, newlywed, and young mother in England; and a divorced single parent, finding her path as a writer and professor in Florida. Alternately clever, humorous, lively, sad, and charming, her book is recommended for both public and academic libraries with large women's collections. [Embalming Mom is the inaugural volume in the University of Iowa Press's new "Sightline Books" series, dedicated to creative nonfiction. Ed.] Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Burroway, author of Cutting Stone (1992) and six other novels, is a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition. Enamored of literature early on, her life path intersected with Sylvia Plath's. Both were guest editors at Mademoiselle in the 1950s; Burroway also attended Cambridge (with such eminent classmates as Margaret Drabble and Ian McKellen), and, like Plath, she feared that marriage would preclude her writing. After adding her frank and enlightening analysis to the ongoing postmortem of Plath's suicide, she records some dark moments of her own. But as she reveals in a deliciously mordant piece about her postdivorce move to Tallahassee with her two sons, she is too intrigued and bemused by life to stay depressed for long. As Burroway remembers her mother, dissects gender roles and political correctness, recounts a chilling session with a callous male gynecologist, and reflects on the marvels and annoyances of the female body, she celebrates all the vicissitudes of womanhood with pride and drollery. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087745907X
• ISBN-13: 978-0877459071
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,138,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful narrative essays about family relationships (Pat McNees, www.comfortdying.com), December 4, 2007

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Pat McNees (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Embalming Mom: Essays in Life (Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction) (Hardcover)

I was late in discovering Janet Burroway, who exemplifies at a very high level the kind of writing I want students in my Life Stories and Legacy Writing classes to write. I took this book along to read on a trip and savored every word. She is a literary writer, and in her case this does not mean hard to read -- it means she goes to the heart of the matter.