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Violation: Collected Essays
Most Anticipated, The Great 2016 Nonfiction Book Preview
The Millions
GROUNDBREAKING. A career-defining book. - The New Yorker
Sallie Tisdale is the author of seven books on such varied subjects as medical technology, her pioneer ancestors, and Buddhist women teachers. Her many essays have appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review , and many other journals. This first collection of work spans 30 years and includes an introduction and brief epilogues to each essay. Tisdale's questing curiosity pursues subjects from the biology of flies to the experience of working in an abortion clinic, why it is so difficult to play sports with men, and whether it's possible for writers to tell the truth. She restlessly returns to themes of the body, the family, and how we try to explain ourselves to each other. She is unwilling to settle for easy answers, and she finds the ambiguity and wonder underneath ordinary events. The collection includes a recent essay never before published, about the mystery of how we present
The Millions
GROUNDBREAKING. A career-defining book. - The New Yorker
Sallie Tisdale is the author of seven books on such varied subjects as medical technology, her pioneer ancestors, and Buddhist women teachers. Her many essays have appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review , and many other journals. This first collection of work spans 30 years and includes an introduction and brief epilogues to each essay. Tisdale's questing curiosity pursues subjects from the biology of flies to the experience of working in an abortion clinic, why it is so difficult to play sports with men, and whether it's possible for writers to tell the truth. She restlessly returns to themes of the body, the family, and how we try to explain ourselves to each other. She is unwilling to settle for easy answers, and she finds the ambiguity and wonder underneath ordinary events. The collection includes a recent essay never before published, about the mystery of how we present
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2016
18 people are currently reading
785 people want to read
About the author
Sallie Tisdale
29 books64 followersSallie Tisdale is the author of Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the year. Her work has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
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May 17, 2016I’m always here for a good personal essay, and this collection was an exciting find. I love Tisdale’s writing. She does the thing I look for in an essayist, which is to show her thought process on the page. She gives us a peek into her mind, and it’s a fascinating place. She’s a fabulous writer too — her sentences sometimes made my jaw drop with their inventiveness and audacity. Tisdale gets a spot on my list of favorite essayists.
– Rebecca Hussey
from The Best Books We Read in April: http://bookriot.com/2016/04/29/riot-r...
– Rebecca Hussey
from The Best Books We Read in April: http://bookriot.com/2016/04/29/riot-r...
June 6, 2019
This is a meaty tome. Not merely in the sense of its heft, but also in terms of its subject matter, which is wide-ranging but defined by preoccupation with life beyond surfaces and the essential questions that have come to define the author's life.
Tisdale is a writer of the body. She is obsessed with our physical presence in the world--how we are born, how we move, how we decay, how we die. In these processes, and our states in between them, she finds manifestation of the ideas that fill her work. Moreover, she counterpoints them with the other organic beings that share our planet. Her essays on elephants, in particular, demonstrate her ability to tease out great meaning from the small rituals that bodies enact, consciously or otherwise.
She writes elliptically, shifting between gradations of tone and register, and attentive to the way time is experienced on the page and in life. These pieces accumulate meaning, becoming stranger and more expansive as they progress. And yet, they never conclude with a bang. She writes neither to dazzle nor to explain. She writes to complicate. There is little in the way of conclusion to be found here, but the writing is all the better for this. It frees this writer to roam and her liberation becomes ours too.
The stone is turned over. Put down. Turned over again. There will always be more to know, even in a frame so small.
Tisdale is a writer of the body. She is obsessed with our physical presence in the world--how we are born, how we move, how we decay, how we die. In these processes, and our states in between them, she finds manifestation of the ideas that fill her work. Moreover, she counterpoints them with the other organic beings that share our planet. Her essays on elephants, in particular, demonstrate her ability to tease out great meaning from the small rituals that bodies enact, consciously or otherwise.
She writes elliptically, shifting between gradations of tone and register, and attentive to the way time is experienced on the page and in life. These pieces accumulate meaning, becoming stranger and more expansive as they progress. And yet, they never conclude with a bang. She writes neither to dazzle nor to explain. She writes to complicate. There is little in the way of conclusion to be found here, but the writing is all the better for this. It frees this writer to roam and her liberation becomes ours too.
The stone is turned over. Put down. Turned over again. There will always be more to know, even in a frame so small.
July 6, 2016
Eludent: That eludes the gaze (OED). An adjective that came to me last night in a semi-sleep state after I finished reading this collection of essays. Tisdale writes as if she is slipping away through some side door: just as you, the reader, think you have her, the author, in sight, you realize she is gone. Elusive, elliptical, evasive, with flashes of elegance. That's how I would describe the essays in this book. As a nurse, I appreciate her two essays that have to do with her work as a nurse. The now almost classic 'Fetus Dreams' and the more recent 'Chemo World.' But the essay that packs the biggest punch for me is the title essay, 'Violation.' There is this passage: "Families are dreadlocked worlds; they tangle together one cannot always get through. It is not easy to have a writer in the family; I understand this. Nor is it easy to be the writer in the family; writers charge themselves with the burden of a family's unspoken story." p. 190
June 24, 2018
Sallie Tisdale's essay collection is profound. Her list of topics is large and varied--from motherhood to sports, but each is treated with beautiful care and shows us the workings of her mind. Her essay Chemo World broke my heart the first time I read it and then all over again when I returned to it again. Sometimes there's a book that's too beautiful to swallow in one go and this is one. I read the book over a few months, reading an essay here and there, each opening my mind to a different way of seeing.
July 11, 2016
Definitely the best collection of essays I have ever read!
June 7, 2017
Some of the best essays be one of the best writers. A wide variety with no disappointments.
February 5, 2017
This is one of the best essay collections I have read in a long time. Crossing a wide range of topics and written over several decades, virtually every essay hit home for me in some way. I can see going back and rereading a number of them.
She addresses and articulates from her perspective the questions we ask ourselves.
"Life is just following a trail around a mountain....."
"So I return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say what can't be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the answers are ambiguous at best."
My favorite essay was the Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies
She addresses and articulates from her perspective the questions we ask ourselves.
"Life is just following a trail around a mountain....."
"So I return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say what can't be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the answers are ambiguous at best."
My favorite essay was the Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies
October 8, 2016
I loved this essay collection. It touches on so many topics (death, family, parenthood, abortion, nature, writing, truth...) with such honesty. Her essays make the reader want to be more observant and self-aware.
I believe book clubs would enjoy talking about the book as a whole and about the individual essays within it.
I believe book clubs would enjoy talking about the book as a whole and about the individual essays within it.
January 3, 2022
I love following Tisdale's mind. Even in an essay about bugs which, let's face it, I could give a fuck about, she makes me care. She's so unflinching in any subject she takes on. I believe her essay about abortion is the best I've ever read. One of my favorite writers--I wish she wrote more.
June 25, 2016
Holy mackerel, this is a motherlode of awesome.
October 3, 2021
The essays in this book are crucial and layered and nearly all of them took me to places swiftly and completely.
December 23, 2017
An essayist's essayist, Tisdale lays out her thinking with elegant, empathetic reasoning, beautifully human in exploring some fraught subjects (her work as an oncology-ward nurse, for example) without being morose, more playful in lighter topics (like a trip to Disneyland) without being flip. This collection covers several decades of her career, but the earliest essays are just as beautifully polished as the later ones.
Book Riot's 2016 Read Harder Challenge—Retro! (undertaken in 2017)
3. Read a collection of essays.
Book Riot's 2016 Read Harder Challenge—Retro! (undertaken in 2017)
3. Read a collection of essays.
August 22, 2018
"We Do Abortions Here," which appeared in Harpers and was Tisdale's most well-known work, is an astounding look at what it is like in an abortion clinic. Tisdale is a nurse and her essays often have to do with aspects of doing caring work.
April 28, 2019
This book called out to me in the bookstore and I wasn’t sure why but I knew I needed to buy it.
Every essay captured me, drew me in, and sometimes left me breathless with her beautiful and inspiring prose. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.
Every essay captured me, drew me in, and sometimes left me breathless with her beautiful and inspiring prose. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.
March 29, 2023
These essays shine with breadth, depth, and humanity. A prolific writer, I don't know how she remains widely unknown. Her essay on abortion is the most compelling piece I've read. Throughout this collection, I've underlined passage after passage, page after page.
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June 15, 2021DNF
May 17, 2019
Masterful.
I read Talk Dirty to Me in the nineties and was captivated. It is the best non-pornographic writing I've ever read about my favorite subject - elegant, courageous and perceptive. I have no idea why it has taken me more than two decades to go back to the Tisdale well. When I checked Violation out from the library, I anticipated that I would read it with pleasure, but I had no idea how much. To the eventual annoyance of my wife (a good-natured, tolerant sort who loves me and loves books as much as I do), I could not shut up about this collection. Any conversation, on any subject, prodded me to share some pithy Sallie Tisdale observation.
Like me, Tisdale is a bit of an intellectual magpie - Violation features essays about subjects as disparate as firefighting, elephant reproduction and social organization, gender relations as demonstrated in amateur athletics, life on a cancer ward, and the ethics of writing nonfiction. Unlike me, her curiosity has rigor. She gets interested in something and studies it until she seemingly knows everything there is to know about it. She conveys her encyclopedic learning, though, from a place of sincere humility. Like any really smart person, she understands just how impossibly much there is to know about this baffling world.
And the writing. The writing. Just breathtaking. "We are all impostors," she writes in my favorite sentence in the book, "never more so than when we try to tell the truth." I think she's right, but I've never read a writer who tried harder. She is relentless with herself and with the limitations of expression, while maintaining a consistent, clearly heartfelt lovingkindness toward the rest of the world that, I would imagine, is partly inspired by her Buddhist practice but mostly by a fundamental decency that shames me. Each sentence is polished to a lapidary shimmer that frequently gives her prose the distilled intensity of poetry, but without the irritating self-regard that oozes out of so many poems. I will confess that sometimes, reaching for an ineffable idea, she lost me, but, while I've come to believe in most instances that if I don't know what a writer is saying it's because the writer didn't know what she was saying either, when Tisdale outpaced me, I knew she would be waiting, right there in the next sentence, for me to catch up.
In the second-to-the-last essay in this anthology, "The Indigo City," a lament about her own mediocrity, she quotes Flaubert. "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." I don't know if she's melted any stars, but her cracked kettle frequently - literally - took my breath away*.
*See? I couldn't make it a few paragraphs without lying. It felt true and I want you to admire her like I do.
I read Talk Dirty to Me in the nineties and was captivated. It is the best non-pornographic writing I've ever read about my favorite subject - elegant, courageous and perceptive. I have no idea why it has taken me more than two decades to go back to the Tisdale well. When I checked Violation out from the library, I anticipated that I would read it with pleasure, but I had no idea how much. To the eventual annoyance of my wife (a good-natured, tolerant sort who loves me and loves books as much as I do), I could not shut up about this collection. Any conversation, on any subject, prodded me to share some pithy Sallie Tisdale observation.
Like me, Tisdale is a bit of an intellectual magpie - Violation features essays about subjects as disparate as firefighting, elephant reproduction and social organization, gender relations as demonstrated in amateur athletics, life on a cancer ward, and the ethics of writing nonfiction. Unlike me, her curiosity has rigor. She gets interested in something and studies it until she seemingly knows everything there is to know about it. She conveys her encyclopedic learning, though, from a place of sincere humility. Like any really smart person, she understands just how impossibly much there is to know about this baffling world.
And the writing. The writing. Just breathtaking. "We are all impostors," she writes in my favorite sentence in the book, "never more so than when we try to tell the truth." I think she's right, but I've never read a writer who tried harder. She is relentless with herself and with the limitations of expression, while maintaining a consistent, clearly heartfelt lovingkindness toward the rest of the world that, I would imagine, is partly inspired by her Buddhist practice but mostly by a fundamental decency that shames me. Each sentence is polished to a lapidary shimmer that frequently gives her prose the distilled intensity of poetry, but without the irritating self-regard that oozes out of so many poems. I will confess that sometimes, reaching for an ineffable idea, she lost me, but, while I've come to believe in most instances that if I don't know what a writer is saying it's because the writer didn't know what she was saying either, when Tisdale outpaced me, I knew she would be waiting, right there in the next sentence, for me to catch up.
In the second-to-the-last essay in this anthology, "The Indigo City," a lament about her own mediocrity, she quotes Flaubert. "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." I don't know if she's melted any stars, but her cracked kettle frequently - literally - took my breath away*.
*See? I couldn't make it a few paragraphs without lying. It felt true and I want you to admire her like I do.
July 26, 2016
An impressive collection of thoughtful, beautifully-written essays. The ones on writing were my favorites, but I also enjoyed the author's essays on an elephant breeding program, Zen Buddhism (and flies!), her work as a nurse, scuba diving with eels, and her complex relationships with various family members. Tisdale makes connections between seemingly disparate topics with ease, and she leaves you thinking about her essays long after you've put them down.
August 10, 2016
Couldn't put this down. The writing (perfect), the range of fascinating subject matter (from elephants to oncology wards to flies to high school classrooms...), and the fact that somehow there emerged a subtle but consistent thread linking them all (The nuances of caring and the difficulties of empathy) blew me away. I wasn't familiar with Sallie Tisdale before picking this up, but now I probably won't stop recommending her.
April 21, 2016
Read this book, people.
April 10, 2017
Excellent essayist. I had never heard of her before, saw her name on a blog, or review? Really like her work.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews