Pure Flame

by Michelle Orange

'Rich and moving' New York Times'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman , author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughterDuring one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review , about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city.A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called 'the great unwritten story': that of the mother-daughter bond.Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2021

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Orange is brilliant. This is a fierce and tender book that finds big questions hidden in the cracks between a mother and daughter. Deeply personal, but for the purposes of looking out at the world. Some of the most precise and moving writing I’ve experienced in a long time.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly beautifully written. The disease suffered by the author's mother hits very, very close to home.

[Donna Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pure Flame by Michelle Orange is a very honest and personal memoir about what it means to be a woman throughout the twentieth century. It is the story of Orange, her mother and her grandmother and the choices they made throughout their lives, as well as the mother-daughter bond. Each of these women was a feminist in their own way in their own time. Orange's mother went to work at age 33 with a toddler and a six year old at home, later going back to school to get her MBA and eventually becoming a CEO. Her grandmother left school in her freshman year of high school to go to work to help her family pay the rent and started experiencing true freedom in her life when she was in her 70's and started traveling the world after her husband died. The book examines the feminist movement and ties that in with how it affected Orange, her mother and her grandmother's relationships to each other. It is a good book and I recommend it. Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of this book prior to publication in exchange for my review. This review is being posted immediately to my GoodReads account and will be posted on Amazon and Barnes and Noble upon the book's publication.

[Katherine G. MacRae · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pure Flame lacked an emotional connection and depth I kept waiting for, rather it felt more like an endless history recital of events with zero emotional attachment and no climax of events. The title belied the contents for me.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Page after page (minute after minute) of mostly feminist rant, even if well written, not particularly edifying.

[Diana George · Rating 5 out of 5]

MICHELLE ORANGE’S PURE FLAME
Pure Flame is a wholly absorbing dive into the relationship between Michelle Orange and her mother Jacqueline, as Jacqueline declines first precipitously, then terribly slowly, toward what will become her death. I read it in can’t-put-it-down novel style because I love Orange’s writing, which always records the grooves of her brainy imagination, not because of any hunger for the subject. I’d read second wave feminism’s theoretical and personal analyses of mothers and daughters for years, and (I thought) exhaustively thought through my own mother’s history. But I was wrong. Orange’s sojourn through her mother’s actions and decisions, her professional achievements and personal failures, the trajectory of their troubled dynamic, did what we always hope fine writing will do for the reader: take you back to the source. For humans, sources include the mother, always literally, and often in ways deeper and dearer than one can bear. Orange’s ruminations on second wave feminism look anew at classic texts for a young generation; and her longing to reach through the multiple layers of detachment between her and her mother, in hopes of achieving true if belated connection, are full of a subtly intense longing that I recognize, having felt much of the same long ago. I'm always convinced that I did my best. But Orange’s own pure flame (the original is Sontag’s—oh it would be—) brought me back to my family’s Jacqueline and taught me, before it might have been too late (she’s dead, but I’m not) that I didn’t do my best at all. I’ve been lying to myself for decades. Because of this brilliant book, I’ve gone back to the memory palace to try again to find my own mother.

[pugs · Rating 3 out of 5]

the focus on legacy from mothers to daughters instead of the historically overabundant father-son relationships was interesting. the familial struggle between adamantly non-feminist mother and boomer/gen x wave feminist daughter made for a grounded narrative. it's noteworthy how white feminism grasped orange and neoliberalism took hold of her mother, seemingly at odds initially, but found a certain common ground when discussing cia operative steinem or dnc selection clinton, leaders continuing to remain relevant in advanced age, who play major roles in imperialist culture, mother and daughter might not be as different after all. in that sense, there's nothing groundbreaking about 'pure flame,' rather a continuation of the theme "i am my mother's daughter" for better or worse, intellectualizing and criticizing the long held notion. throughout the differences and hardships, it's another chapter to add to the lineage. the role reversal of care taker to receiver, daughter mothering the mother, is where 'pure flame' really shines, it's tragic but strangely uplifting, and credit must be given for focusing on care, not necessarily cure. so many elderly people die alone or with strangers, there's something to be said for those who pass amidst family care. books like these are hard to review or "score," what did i get out of it, does that even matter? a therapeutic book for some, i'm sure.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“From my mother I learned that storytelling is a treacherous business […] I came to resent this as a chef might resent having been raised on gruel.” In Michelle Orange’s Pure Flame: a legacy, the perils — historical, literary, personal — inherent in mother-daughter relationships are brought, with vigour and honesty, to light. Orange skilfully maps tensions in this dynamic with tensions in the feminist movement, and applies critical lenses to it; exploring primarily her own relationship with her mother, fraught and yet ultimately so desperately devotional, the ideas of writers like Simone de Beauvoir and Adrienne Rich — and above-all, over-and-over, Susan Sontag — combine with concepts from evolutionary biology and sociopolitical history, to tell overlapping stories: of illness, of ambition + legacy drive, of maternal lines. A long illness afflicts her mother, occupying a mass of Orange’s project: “The relationship of the lung to metaphor is a story of missed opportunity” — within a history of pneumonia, Hippocrates and Hillary Clinton, Orange casts her mother’s illness and the role she herself must play in it as part of a wider pattern of restlessness: her mother’s, wanting more than doting wife and mother; her own, wanting more from a life she constantly rages against. This anger defines the matriarchal order, “the flame by which I had lived, toiled, and sought my own reflection. I don’t burn like her, but pure and plain enough to light my own way.”

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is a fascinating story about the author and the two major women of her life, her mother and her grandmother on her mother’s side. Her grandmother got married, raised a family and felt generally unfulfilled. Her mother was doing the same thing, when she decides to go back to school and get an MBA and then takes a job that’s in a different city, leaving her husband and two children behind to see on weekends. The author, who is a teacher and essayist, examines how these two women shaped her life and what feminism means to her and them, while also using examples of mother/daughter relationship in the recent past. Such an honest and open book that never loses its clear eye for the hard truths of family.

[Herzog · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a heartrending book much enhanced for me by the fact that I knew her mother a bit. Michelle does a superb job of capturing the mother-daughter relationship with meaningful touches of other female writers thoughts on aspects of the feminine experience. What a wonderful, loving portrait of her mother. Godspeed Jackie!

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I can appreciate and relate to the struggles of the mother-daughter relationship, Orange’s feelings were not authentically conveyed during the course of the book. Instead, I felt as if I was reading the intellectualized, university admissions essay version of the way her mother’s choices impacted her, therefore limiting the empathy I had for the author and her life.

[Anna Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at a mother-daughter relationship. Never simple, always tinged with past hurts and unresolved anger, sorrow as two women navigate a hard-to reach resolution to their differences. It's also a long look at the histories of the women's movement - from two different points of view.

[Elbrackeen Brackeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This made a fantastic read following Oh, William. Some interesting parallels in that fictional world with this autobiographical one.

[AMAO · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure Flame: A Memoir by Michelle Orange
Published June 1, 2021


“During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.”
So begins Michelle Orange’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy—in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother’s many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her mother’s midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called “the great unwritten story”: that of the mother-daughter bond.

The death of Orange’s maternal grandmother at nearly ninety-six and the fear that her mother’s more “successful” life will not be as long bring new urgency to her questions about the woman whose absence and anger helped shape her life. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it. Told with warmth and rigor, Orange’s account of her mother’s life and their relationship is pressurized in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in an essential, revelatory meditation on becoming, selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother’s daughter now.

[Rosemary Daniell]

Pure Flame by Canadian writer Michelle Orange is the kind of memoir I like best: one written by a highly intelligent and well read author about her experiences with an unusual person––in this case, her mother, a successful business woman who she never knew very well when she was younger, but who gets to know as she ages, an experience that increases her respect. Along the well, she delves into the wisdom of the time––Susan Sontag's work, second-wave feminism, and how it affects both their lives. Pure Flame is a moving, touching and stimulating memoir.