Turning Bones

American Lives

by Lee Martin

Farmers and pragmatists, hardworking people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin’s ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from the birth certificates and gravestones that marked their comings and goings, they left little written record of their lives. So when Lee, the last living Martin, inherited his great-grandfather’s eighty acres and needed to know what had brought his family to this pass and this point, he had only the barest of public records—and the stirrings of his imagination—to connect him to his past, and to his beginnings. Turning Bones is the remarkable story brought to life by this collaboration of personal history and fiction. It is the moving account of a family’s migration over two hundred years and through six generations, imagined, reconstructed, and made to speak to the author, and to readers, of a lost world. A recovery of the missing, Turning Bones is also one man’s story of love and compromise as he separates himself from his family’s agrarian history, fully knowing by book’s end what such a journey has cost.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

194 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; Quakertown; Break the Skin; Yours, Jean; The Glassmaker's Wife; and the soon-to-be-released, The Evening Shades. He has also published four memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, Such a Life, and Gone the Hard Road. His first book was the short story collection, The Least You Need To Know, and he recently published another, The Mutual UFO Netwlrk. He is the co-editor of Passing the Word: Writers on Their Mentors. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper's, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he was the winner of the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Reviews

[Susanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style in this book is wonderful, and I admire how Martin takes the bare bones of his family history and imagines what their personalities and lives must have been like. It is a creative way to combine fiction and nonfiction. He also does an excellent job of weaving in his own life story, making this a braided work of nonfiction, autobiography, and fiction. As much as I admire all of this, the work did not hold together, and I could not keep the various members of his family and timeline straight. I had to keep looking back at the family tree, and even that did not help much. I should have taken notes as I read. When I reached the ending, I figured out why, perhaps, the work did not satisfy me as a whole. Half of the chapters had previously been published as individual essays and then collected for this book with the other half, I assume, filling in gaps.

[Krys · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is equally gorgeous and frustrating. Lee Martin was a professor of mine and this memoir of sorts is a shining example of everything he taught about creative nonfiction. Part imagination, part research, part personal essay, the weaker sections (of which there are sections) are made up for with the earnest and beautiful prose with which Lee writes in other sections. I recommend this for anyone interested in exploring the relationship between fiction and nonfiction.

[Andrea Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beginning felt somewhat slow, but little by little I became more absorbed in the characters and stories. Lee Martin is a fantastic writer, and did an incredible job at bringing emotions and stories to life.