Girl Behind the Door - Softcover
Literary Nonfiction. The unsparing homecoming of the prodigal daughter to help care for her dying mother. A New York writer is drawn back to the rural Iowa of her youth when her mother's health begins to fail and dementia rears its head. While camped out in the nursing home's Alzheimer's unit she investigates and relives her early life as the daughter of a single mother and big, Czech extended family. Her Protestant minister and entrepreneur brothers travel in from other states, and she observes and bonds with the staff that now populate her life. She finds more compassion and forgiveness for her mother than she was able to muster as an out-of- control teenager. She doesn't sugarcoat her early failings. The surroundings bring Dickinson to remember the second-hand clothes, the delicious Czech foods, and her well-coiffed and well-educated mother who unwittingly married a greedy and cruel man, and then grabbed her children and escaped. Dickinson relives her teenage hitchhiking escapades that end in the tragedy of her being shot. Dickinson provides insight and humor to the universal, familiar mother-daughter struggles and the pain of nurturing a parent at the end of their life.
"GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR opens with the renegade Iowa farm girl who ran away to New York City to be a writer returning home to find her dying, nearly 100-year-old mother lying naked on a bed in the Memory Care Unit of a nursing home. Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinson's language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God."—Alice Jurish
"As a teenager she decided to fly. Her mother's old Rambler with her at the wheel crested the hill, with grave consequences. In GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR, Stephanie Dickinson flies on every page. What a book! A delicious memoir, or deathwatch, in which death dies. Florence, her mother, lives. Iowa lives, all 'the gone ones.' We know her childhood better than we know our own, the Bureshes and Teleckys better than our own relatives. A read with moist eyes. Unflagging emotion and exquisite clarity, incredible candor and perspicacity, her signature poetry. It is brave, naked as her dementia mother. Our eyes are wet and our hearts are full. It is a farewell that makes you hungry for life. She heaps our plates."—Jill Hoffman
"GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR opens with the renegade Iowa farm girl who ran away to New York City to be a writer returning home to find her dying, nearly 100-year-old mother lying naked on a bed in the Memory Care Unit of a nursing home. Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinson's language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God."—Alice Jurish
"As a teenager she decided to fly. Her mother's old Rambler with her at the wheel crested the hill, with grave consequences. In GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR, Stephanie Dickinson flies on every page. What a book! A delicious memoir, or deathwatch, in which death dies. Florence, her mother, lives. Iowa lives, all 'the gone ones.' We know her childhood better than we know our own, the Bureshes and Teleckys better than our own relatives. A read with moist eyes. Unflagging emotion and exquisite clarity, incredible candor and perspicacity, her signature poetry. It is brave, naked as her dementia mother. Our eyes are wet and our hearts are full. It is a farewell that makes you hungry for life. She heaps our plates."—Jill Hoffman
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Stephanie Emily Dickinson, raised on an Iowa farm, now lives in New York City. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Oregon. Her work appears in Hotel Amerika, Mudfish, Weber Studies, Fjords, Water-Stone Review, Gargoyle, Rhino, Stone Canoe, Westerly, and New Stories from the South, among others. Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg is available from New Michigan Press. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her recent novel Love Highway, based on the 2006 Jennifer Moore murder. Her latest book is GIRL BEHIND THE DOOR (Rain Mountain Press, 2017). Her work has received multiple distinguished story citations in the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Mysteries. She is the editor of Rain Mountain Press. She shares an East Village walk-up with the poet Rob Cook and two felines, Sally Joy and Vallejo.
Review:
As a teenager she decided to fly. Her mothers old Rambler with her at the wheel crested the hill, with grave consequences. In Girl Behind the Door, Stephanie Dickinson flies on every page. What a book! A delicious memoir, or deathwatch, in which death dies. Florence, her mother, lives. Iowa lives, all the gone ones. We know her childhood better than we know our own, the Bureshes and Teleckys better than our own relatives. A read with moist eyes. Unflagging emotion and exquisite clarity, incredible candor and perspicacity, her signature poetry. It is brave, naked as her dementia mother. Our eyes are wet and our hearts are full. It is a farewell that makes you hungry for life. She heaps our plates. Jill Hoffman Girl Behind the Door opens with the renegade Iowa farm girl who ran away to New York City to be a writer returning home to find her dying, nearly 100-year-old mother lying naked on a bed in the Memory Care Unit of a nursing home. Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinsons language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God. Alice Jurish --Jill Hoffman and Alice Jurish
Dickinsons memoir encompasses aspects of the trauma memoir: she was raped while hitchhiking, was disfigured in an accidental shooting, but she encompasses the trauma while working on a larger canvas: a family history that spans generations. The conceit of the book is Dickinson returns to her Iowa home to be with her mother, and two half brothers (to whom the book is dedicated) in their mother s final hours. During the death bed vigil their mother acts as madeleine to reveal her personal history: her wild child days rebelling against all forms of authority, drinking, having sex, drugs use, and recklessly driving without a license in a way that caused fatal harm to others. She neglects her studies, blows off college to embark on one of these ill-fated hitchhiking experiences, and gradually comes of age severely damaged but knowing it is time to move on and move out. All through this thoroughly engaging, expertly crafted, finally balanced memoir, we sense an authorial balance that has come to terms with her limitations and uses her mother s final hours to find her place among his her ancestral history. Readers of her fiction, poetry and essays will see how her life directly informs her creative work. Interested readers are encouraged to see her novel of the rape, Half-Girl, The Emily Fables, a prose poetic recreation of the inner life and times of her grandmother as well as life on the farm in rural Iowa at the turn of the last century and beyond, and her book of poetry, Corn Goddess. In fact I would recommend all of her many, and varied books , from Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, which I recently read for the second time, Lust Series, to the chilling noir, Love Highway, a murder story based on an actual event. This memoir re-enforces the idea that looking back with regret accomplishes nothing, but looking back, with a clear-eyed sense of self, is a form of moving on, damaged, perhaps, but as a more complete person. --Alan Catlin
The great state of Iowa has raised many chickens, but Stephanie Dickinson sure as rain isnt one of them. Bravely tackling the complex nature of the mother-daughter relationship through all of its peaks and valleys, Dickinsons memorable prose will by turns amuse you, wrench your heart, and curl your toes. Dickinson provides us with a panoply of object lessons; most notably, how, at the moments that really count, rebelliousness turns to tenderness and we tightly clutch our familial cords and connections, even while butting heads with them. In Girl Behind the Door, we learn that the landscape from which this fiercely passionate writer hails possesses the best soil on earth, and Stephanie Dickinson has dug deeply into the muck and mire to unearth her past and, in doing so, ours. --Cindy Hochman
Dickinsons memoir encompasses aspects of the trauma memoir: she was raped while hitchhiking, was disfigured in an accidental shooting, but she encompasses the trauma while working on a larger canvas: a family history that spans generations. The conceit of the book is Dickinson returns to her Iowa home to be with her mother, and two half brothers (to whom the book is dedicated) in their mother s final hours. During the death bed vigil their mother acts as madeleine to reveal her personal history: her wild child days rebelling against all forms of authority, drinking, having sex, drugs use, and recklessly driving without a license in a way that caused fatal harm to others. She neglects her studies, blows off college to embark on one of these ill-fated hitchhiking experiences, and gradually comes of age severely damaged but knowing it is time to move on and move out. All through this thoroughly engaging, expertly crafted, finally balanced memoir, we sense an authorial balance that has come to terms with her limitations and uses her mother s final hours to find her place among his her ancestral history. Readers of her fiction, poetry and essays will see how her life directly informs her creative work. Interested readers are encouraged to see her novel of the rape, Half-Girl, The Emily Fables, a prose poetic recreation of the inner life and times of her grandmother as well as life on the farm in rural Iowa at the turn of the last century and beyond, and her book of poetry, Corn Goddess. In fact I would recommend all of her many, and varied books , from Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, which I recently read for the second time, Lust Series, to the chilling noir, Love Highway, a murder story based on an actual event. This memoir re-enforces the idea that looking back with regret accomplishes nothing, but looking back, with a clear-eyed sense of self, is a form of moving on, damaged, perhaps, but as a more complete person. --Alan Catlin
The great state of Iowa has raised many chickens, but Stephanie Dickinson sure as rain isnt one of them. Bravely tackling the complex nature of the mother-daughter relationship through all of its peaks and valleys, Dickinsons memorable prose will by turns amuse you, wrench your heart, and curl your toes. Dickinson provides us with a panoply of object lessons; most notably, how, at the moments that really count, rebelliousness turns to tenderness and we tightly clutch our familial cords and connections, even while butting heads with them. In Girl Behind the Door, we learn that the landscape from which this fiercely passionate writer hails possesses the best soil on earth, and Stephanie Dickinson has dug deeply into the muck and mire to unearth her past and, in doing so, ours. --Cindy Hochman
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRain Mountain Press
- Publication date2017
- ISBN 10 149510608X
- ISBN 13 9781495106088
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages236
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want