Publisher's Synopsis
A memoir of the haunting and redemptive events of the acclaimed writer's life-the betrayal of a con-man father; a murder-suicide in his family's house; the presence of an oystercatcher-each one, as the saying goes, stranger than fiction As with many of us, the life of novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of "arresting strangeness." Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman's story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales-including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is, "I hate to leave this beautiful...
