In a breathtaking blend of lyrical memoir, photographs, and textual artifacts, Mother of Stories examines the complex legacy of a mother who was a gifted teacher, a passionate reader, and a pathological liar.
While Alice Dailey was immersed in an academic study of death in Shakespeare's history plays, her mother died from toxic exposure to mold. Composed in a fugue of grief, Mother of Stories is Dailey's uncompromising account of the months before and after her mother's death. Through varied forms of episodic and visual recreation, Mother of Stories confronts what it means to inherit violent family narratives and, in their wake, to have to reconceive the borders between lived, imaginary, and literary experience.
A hybrid, richly imaginative work that synthesizes past and present, counterfeit and real, Mother of Stories oscillates between the inescapable weight of history and the cathartic liberation of art and storytelling. In constructing a poetic assemblage reminiscent at once of medieval miscellanies and contemporary experimental autotheory, Dailey's acts of rehearsing, cutting, and folding history generate forms of radical critique that puncture and reconstitute the limits of literary nonfiction.
ISBN: | 9781531506476 |
Publication date: | 2nd July 2024 |
Author: | Alice Dailey |
Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
Format: | Paperback |
Pagination: | 160 pages |
Genres: |
Poetry Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Coping with / advice about death and bereavement |