Remembering The Bone House [Paperback]

Nancy Mairs (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807070696 | ISBN-13: 978-0807070697 | Publication Date: June 30, 1995

Nancy Mairs reconstructs her past by exploring her erotic and emotional development in order to lay claim to her life—and women's lives in general. Lyrical, intense, and particular, flouting taboos and self-censorship, this acclaimed memoir explores the spaces that have shaped a life, including the "bone house" of her body.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Now in her mid-40s, Mairs, an essayist and poet, recalls the past in lyrical descriptions of her home and loving kin in New England, as well as the house in Arizona where she settled later with her husband and children. But readers may not get far past the threshhold of understanding the "bone house," as the author regards her body. Mairs ( Plaintext ; In All the Rooms of the Yellow House ) is a person of accomplishments, coping with multiple sclerosis and recovering from suicide attempts and other ills to succeed as a college teacher as well as a writer. Yet her book loses much of its zest because of her incessant repetition, in eventually wearisome detail, of her sexual adventures with many men and her brief affair with a woman. Though Mairs believes these experiences were necessary to create erotic poetry--the linchpin of her life--the lurid effects drown her poet's voice and seem more exploitative than revelatory.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Colored by experience, mind and body together shape and are reshaped by one's personal memories; for women, many have argued, it is the dimension of space, rather than the masculine dimension of time, that is life's primary medium. In middle age, poet/teacher Mairs (also a daughter, sister, parent, lover, mental patient, and victim of multiple sclerosis) writes out a life motivated by "the desire to contact others, to share my experiences with them, to stir them to recognition of the similarities that underlie their experiences and mine. . . ." She succeeds, providing a psychologically astute account of life in her particular "bone house" (i.e., body) that elicits not only interest and empathy but also the reader's own memories. Occasionally polemical in its feminism, this work ultimately rises above political explanations to reveal lived reality. For academic humanities collections as well as public libraries.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (June 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807070696
• ISBN-13: 978-0807070697
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #206,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Disorders & Diseases > Multiple Sclerosis

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

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars remembering Remembering the Bone House, October 13, 2000

By 

Hilde Kaiser - See all my reviews

This review is from: Remembering The Bone House (Paperback)

I read most of this book in one morning, over coffee-flavored milk and French toast made with wheat bread (it turned out OK). In the new preface in this edition, Nancy Mairs confesses that it's both "the dearest of her books," and also the "gawkiest." Dear but gawky is a good description. I wasn't blown away by the writing, but what I read lingered with me well past the afternoon. The subtitle, "an erotics of place and space," is the book's theme (to use an old-fashioned word). How your physicality (where you live, who you're surrounded by, the erotic charge or condition of your body) affects you psychologically, intellectually, how you, as a woman, can reclaim some of that stuff, is well-modulated. It's the pacing that seems slightly off. It's painful to wade through childhood and early marriage and nervous breakdown (you knew there was going to be one) before we get Nancy Mairs, the writer, in the memoir. Maybe that's unfair to say, since that's how it all unraveled in life, and there are little hints of possibility. But, I dawdled through most of the beginning, and, you get the feeling that this is the stuff that had to be written to make way for other writing. And the whole "erotics of place and space" thing comes across as a little old-fashioned, pre-certain-kinds-of-literary-theory, but that may not matter to you. There are extremely good bits. The chapter, "Inside and Outside," about the nexus of Mairs's rediscovery of herself as a writer with an erotic reawakening is great. This book is very honest and brave, especially about sexual stuff. Her description of those summers on "The Farm," and its lilies and barn cats, and that perfect version of a writer's group that meets on Mondays and swims afterward and has zucchini quiches is an unsulliable interlude, despite the violence that also happens there. You can't help but like reading the writing-of-oneself-into-being. People who like memoirs will undoubtedly be drawn to this book, and gain something from reading it. I give it a friendly, rather than a disparaging, three stars -- I almost would prefer not to quantify it. While it's neither a masterpiece, nor, I suspect, Mairs's best work (I'm ready to read something with keener focus), it's OK, gawky and dear. A little like most of our lives, our own writing.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for every woman, March 11, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Remembering The Bone House (Paperback)

I was first turned on to this book in an undergraduate womens's studies class and I have yet to find another book I feel so passionately about. It's a down to earth, personal memoir of one woman's struggle to find herself. This book portrays the realities of life in the coming of age and the search for your place within the bone house (your dwellings - your body and your home). Any woman can relate to this story and find comfort in its telling. Once discovered, it's a book you'll want to pick up again and again and a book you'll want to share with your closest friends

4 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a good one..., August 16, 1999

By 

Joel D. Gruhn "joelgn" (Barrington, RI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Remembering The Bone House (Paperback)

I believe this book may be a bit miss-classified. Every comment I have read about it makes a reference to "Women's Studies" or feminism. Naaah! She is way too open, too free of the urges to posture and self-censor for that!

In this memoir, Nancy Mairs tells her own story straight up, leaving the gender stereotypes behind. It all reads refreshingly true, with a Yankee voice so clean it begs to be read aloud.