Awkward: A Detour

by Mary Cappello

Los Angeles Times Bestseller

“Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” —MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

“A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” —SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger

Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.

Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

Cappello is originally from Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from State University of New York, Buffalo, and her B.A. from Dickinson College. Cappello has taught at the University of Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, and at the University of Rochester.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once easy and hard to put down. A rare gathering of thoughts, answers, and questions.

A favorite passage: "And then one day it hits you - not all at once but in waves, and who knows why this particular day is to be a wave of succession or what led to it, but it hits you in a suffusing kind of way - of the time things take and of the need to live long enough to receive all the truths you weren't ready to receive, all in good time and at the right time, in readiness or shock, in openness or choosing now, marshalling your resources to throw some habit off its course; of the need to live long enough to face a desire, to make something happen and live with the happening's of the time it takes to learn about all that was good, and all the good you could do, or just to feel the ground beneath you as though it were strewn with bay leaves or egg crates, seashells, or shards; or the sense of a vanishing now at the site of what once was lush undergrowth and concrete, deep pockets of what-had-beens, a corner of the yard where a tap on the arm mingled with the smoky waft of a hot dog plumping on a grill and hydrangea was a face made of lacy stars pulling your own face toward it, or just to know it was there to hide behind, a placemarker at that juncture in the garden, like a doily dropped onto your head at church telling you you were there, you'd known this once, you'd been there before; to live long enough to become fully sentient."

[Lee Kofman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t manage to get through more than 20 or so pages in this book. Cappello is clearly smart and quite an original writer, the topic is interesting and the idea to dedicate an entire book to exploring the various aspects of awkwardness appealed to me, this is why I bought this book. But… this time the ‘but’ was enormous for me. The book was just plain boring. It mostly reads like Surrealist poetry style free flow writing. The sentences tend to the abstract and generic (I wonder whether Cappello’s academic work is an impediment to her clearly also existing creative streak). When she reveals something specific and personal about herself, it often bears only a slight relation to the notion of awkwardness, plus there was nothing particularly interesting in her experiences for me. I tried not to give up so quickly and leafed through the rest of the book – it all seemed the same as the first 20 pages. To sum up, the book reads like a cold-blooded, self-indulgent academic exercise. Couldn’t see any urgency behind it, nor particular wisdom.

[Heather Durham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will not be for everyone, but it was most definitely for me. I love a well-written, meandering, insightful and surprising literary essay as a window into a curious mind at its most brilliant, and this book reads like one epic essay on the idea of awkwardness, daring to spend multiple chapters on a single tangential idea or word. Though I couldn’t read this book quickly and needed time to digest it, I did thoroughly enjoy everywhere it took me. As Cappello shares on page one, “I want for my day to be split open by a tidal wave of strange imaginings when I read, for something, anything, to break through.” This book broke through, for me, again and again, and I am grateful for it.

[Fey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Be my senpai *__*

[Lauren]

This sounds fantastic. I'm marking it as a favorite book even though I haven't read it yet.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely smart weaving of the personal and the theoretical. An inspiring example of a way to make texts and feelings speak through each other with grace and without violence.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awkwardness can be beautiful. I want to learn to think like this. And write like this. She is such a generous person, too--so delightful.