Goodbye, Ruby (Kindle Single)

The Family Tooth #3

by Ellis Avery

Getting one’s first period is a rite of passage, but one’s last period? Most women don’t know it at the time. Novelist Ellis Avery marks this unusual milestone in an essay about undergoing a hysterectomy at the age of 39 after being diagnosed with a rare uterine cancer. A wrenching account of Avery’s attempt to keep an ovary—and with it the semblance of life before cancer—GOODBYE, RUBY offers a fond and funny farewell to a quarter-century of menstruation. Of course it's also about beauty, fertility, aging, sex, the author’s mother, Hilary Mantel, and Michelle Tea. The third of three essays selected from a forthcoming memoir on grief, illness, and food entitled THE FAMILY TOOTH. To learn more about THE FAMILY TOOTH, please visit ellisavery.com. Ellis Avery writes from the depths of loss and fear with emotional precision and visceral sensuality. But foremost it’s her ability to attain a graceful, benevolent perspective on it all that makes these essays soar. --Alison Bechdel Ellis Avery uses her novelist's powers to tell the true story of her life in crisis. She faces her mother's death and her own near-death with an artist's intelligence and imagination--and humor. Reading these essays brings tears of grief and laughter. --Maxine Hong Kingston Ellis Avery captures the stillness and the drama of everyday life with elegance and poetry, never shying away from the struggles that make us human. --Michelle Tea About the The only writer ever to have received the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction twice, Ellis Avery is the author of two novels, a memoir, and a book of poetry. Her novels, THE LAST NUDE (Riverhead 2012) and THE TEAHOUSE FIRE (Riverhead 2006) have also received Lambda, Ohioana, and Golden Crown awards, and her work has been translated into six languages. Avery edits an urban observations column for Public Books, works one-on-one with writers as a manuscript consultant, and teaches fiction writing at Columbia University. www.ellisavery.comCover design by Kerry Ellis.

20 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 20, 2015

About the author

The only writer ever to have received the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction twice, Ellis Avery is the author of two novels, a memoir, and a book of poetry. Her novels, The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012) and The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead 2006) have also received Lambda, Ohioana, and Golden Crown awards, and her work has been translated into six languages. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and out of her home in the West Village.

Raised in Columbus, Ohio and Princeton, New Jersey, Avery’s first love as a reader was the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin. In her teenage years, she discovered writers like Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf, whose lush specificity tempted her back to the waking world.

Interested in the overlap between theater, anthropology, and religion, Avery pursued an independent major in Performance Studies at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1993. She spent the next few years in San Francisco working for queer youth organizations and earning an MFA in Writing from Goddard College’s low residency program. Drawn back to the seasons and architecture of the East Coast, she settled in New York in 1997, where she met her partner of fifteen years, Sharon Marcus.

After personally witnessing the devastation of September 11th, 2001, and the anti-war response that swept the city in its wake, Avery wrote her first book, a personal account of the attacks and their aftermath entitled The Smoke Week. She spent five years studying Japanese language and tea ceremony, including seven months in Kyoto, in order to write her first novel, The Teahouse Fire. A lifelong love of Paris in the 1920s led Avery to write her second novel, The Last Nude, a love letter to Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop and publisher of Ulysses; to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; and to the sleek Art Deco imagery of Tamara de Lempicka.

Reviews

[The Idle Woman · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. For something that affects 50% of the population 25% of the time, people certainly get funny talking about periods. When Ellis Avery is diagnosed with uterine cancer, she’s told that her only option is a hysterectomy. This short but poignant little essay follows her struggle to accept this – not so much for the loss of her uterus, since she has decided she is happy without children – but for the loss of her ovaries, which leave her at much greater risk of osteoporosis, heart disease, Parkinson’s and dementia. She’s staggered by how matter-of-fact her surgeons seem to be, and how difficult it is to explain her position to her beloved partner Sharon. The doctors don’t seem to understand why a woman in her position would hesitate. Frustrated by the double standards that the world applies, Avery explains: ‘“They all want to cut off my balls”, my angry brain fizzed, “and nobody cares.” Had I been a man, losing a reproductive organ would have been The Most Tragic Thing Ever, regardless of whether I wanted children. But I was a woman who did not want children, so it wasn’t supposed to matter.‘ But it does, of course. Deeply. Avery writes with gratitude of the example of Hilary Mantel, a shining beacon who underwent a hysterectomy at a young age and has remained vibrant, brilliant, celebrated. A heartfelt paean to the importance of ovaries, and menstruation, in shaping a woman’s life and giving her a sense of identity – and the cataclysmic sense of loss when such things are abruptly snatched away..

For a post on The Family Tooth, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/02/24/t...