Plaintext: Essays [Paperback]

Nancy Mairs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1992

"The difficulties and despairs through which she has passed have left Nancy Mairs with unique and moving stories to convey, as well as with a strong voice to tell them." —New York Times Book Review

"These striking essays by Nancy Mairs are so touching and heartbreakingly honest that one often has to put the book down and rest emotionally before reading on. . . . Readable and compelling, written with intimacy . . . and a swagger." —San Francisco Chronicle

"The lugubriousness and self-pity which one might expect to surround these subjects is absent. The prose is cool and the wit as dry as sundown in Mairs' Arizona desert, the jokes as witty as the bright pink flowers on my spiny cactus." —Women's Review of Books

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Five essays in Mairs's collection have been previously published in magazines. The other seven are originals that will speak clearly to the hearts of women in ambiguous positions as society dictates changes in traditional roles. A wife and the mother of two grown children, the author reveals intimate information about her life, personal and professional. Although she is afflicted by multiple sclerosis, Mairs, who lives in Arizona, copes with her job as a teacher and writer, in ways she describes in "On Being a Cripple." Sparing herself little, she reveals crises that drove her to attempt suicide, the battles against the clinical depression that hospitalized her, and other periods of serious danger. It's clear that work and a keen wit are Mairs's strongest allies. She can laugh at her own fumbling methods of surviving. The author's convictions are stated in "A Letter to Matthew," her son. She counsels him to reject the values that determine the attitude of elderly men toward women. Matthew, she writes, is young enough to change.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

In lucid, forthright essays, Nancy Mairs examines acute anxiety, suicidal depression, and the physical realities of coping with multiple sclerosis. She also writes about what she loves and what she has learned: "I am wounded easily, but I am just as easily delighted." Since the rigors of MS and agoraphobia make many of life's usual "adventures" impossible for her, Nancy Mairs redefines adventure within her own parameters, not by what one does but by the passion or thoroughness with which one does it. Her feminism, like her sense of adventure, begins in personal experience and extends to something larger than the plain details. Describing her stay in a psychiatric hospital as a young mother, she recounts each agonizing step of her survival (not "recovery") and relates this experience to the "madwoman" paradigm that haunts women who have confronted raw frustration and existential panic. And while she hates her physical limitations and refuses to be defined by them, she is determined to expand her outlook even through the experience of being "crippled" (the word she chooses to use). Her struggles are heated in the crucible of her empathy "in searching for and shaping a stable core in a life wrenched by change and loss ... I must recognize the same process ... in the lives around me." This writer teaches, by her living and working example, the ways we may incorporate and transform the obstacles in our lives. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (August 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816513376
• ISBN-13: 978-0816513376
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #492,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

NANCY MAIRS

Nancy Mairs, though born by accident of war in Long Beach, California, grew up north of Boston. In 1964, she received the A.B. cum laude from Wheaton College (Norton, Massachusetts), which made her a Doctor of Humane Letters thirty years later. She earned the M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) in 1975 and the Ph.D. in English literature (with a minor in English education) in 1984 from the University of Arizona. She has taught writing and literature at Salpointe Catholic High School, the University of Arizona, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

A poet and an essayist, she was awarded the 1984 Western States Book Award in poetry for In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (Confluence Press, 1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. The Arizona Humanities Council gave her their 2008 Literary Treasure Award. Her first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays entitled Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1986. Since then, she has written a memoir, Remembering the Bone House, a spiritual autobiography, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, and three more books of essays, Carnal Acts, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. These are available from Beacon Press, as are her most recent books, A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, which was supported by a fellowship from the Project on Death in America of the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute, and A Dynamic God.

She and her husband, George, a retired high-school English teacher, continue to live in Tucson, though they make public appearances throughout the country. A Research Associate and SIROW Scholar with the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, she has also served on the boards of the Arizona Center for Disability Law, Kore Press, the Coalition of Arizonans To Abolish the Death Penalty, and ARTability.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Make a new and very intimate friend., May 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Plaintext: Essays (Paperback)

I have never read a book of essays from beginning to end but I could not put this one down. It reads like a novel with the depth of an extended poem. Each essay presents a journey into the interior of human heart--an intricate, rocky road through emotions and experiences entirely unique and yet completely understandable. Sometimes I felt like I was looking in the mirror, finding my whole life in a line, on a page. Other times I felt as if I had made a new and very intimate friend.

I chose this book because I have been struggling with a new-found disability and had read that Nancy Mairs had written about her experiences with Multiple Sclerosis in an essay with the gutsy title: "On Being a Cripple." I was delighted to hear Mairs treat this issue with pain and wisdom, and then move on to so many more aspects of her own life story. The writing is exquisite--complex, delicate, and blunt. The stories are gripping accounts of infidelity, depression, suicide, terror, appreciation, parenting, sex, mystery, loneliness, humor, writing, and love. The honesty with which she reveals details about herself and her family is unprecedented. And some sort of affiirmation comes with each gritty revelation, making the irreducible value of human experience once again apparent. Mairs is a feminist, but not in any formulaic manner. Her plea is that women be given the opportunity to explore all of the facets of their own humanity; that being locked in limited roles has caused so many of us to go "mad." Her poignant recollections of younger days are all but universal. Who has not felt different, alienated, self-effacing, and alone at least some time in their life? I cannot imagine anyone not being gripped by the courage and the genius of Mairs' honesty and introspection.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical essays about being different, December 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Plaintext: Essays (Paperback)

I've read only a few of Mairs' essays from this volume, and the ones I've read are beautifully crafted. Nancy Mairs hates having MS, yet she is not sorry to be a cripple (a term she prefers to handicapped or disabled.) How can this be? Nancy Mairs reveals her life as it is lived day-to-day, as a married, employed, active, wife, mother, and, most importantly, woman and human being. Her style and tone is such that even those unconnected to any kind of disability or disabled person will be profoundly moved by her autobiographical essays.

5.0 out of 5 stars Plainly spoken - penetrates deeply, June 21, 2009

By 

Philochoros (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plaintext: Essays (Paperback)

I discovered this book over a decade ago, and return to it every few years. It remains fresh with each visit. Mairs' writing is deceptively simple, and profoundly moving. Nothing sentimental, just a woman who faces her challenges in a direct way, and communicates her thoughts and feelings with remarkable honesty and clarity.