An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays

Description

From a brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism

Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own lifea childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her sonto excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncles suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

Author Information

Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World; and Life Is Everywhere. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Harpers, The Paris Review, and Vogue. She is the 202325 Bonderman Professor of the Practice at Brown University.