Embalming Mom: Essays in Life

by Janet Burroway

In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life - divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes, and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlights the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.

I Didn't Know Sylvia Plath --
Danger and Domesticity in the Deep South --
Embalming Mom --
Footprints --
Eleventh Hour --
Dad Scattered --
Changes --
Trash Talk --
My One True West --
Freeze Frame --
Pool --
PC and PC --
We Eat the Earth --
Of the Beholder --
Soldier Son --
Bonnes Anniversaires

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Janet Burroway is the author of seven novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner up for the national Book award), Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone; a volume of poetry, Material Goods; a collection of essays, Embalming Mom; and two children's books, The Truck on the Track and The Giant Jam Sandwich. Her most recent plays, Medea With Child, Sweepstakes, Division of Property, and Parts of Speech, have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and a multi-genre textbook, Imaginative Writing, appeared in 2002. A B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. from Cambridge University, England, she was Yale School of Drama RCA-NBC Fellow 1960-61, and is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Reviews

[Ayelet Waldman]

This woman is one of the best writers out there and it is a CRIME that she is not better known. Go buy this book. If you can only buy one book, buy hers, not mine.

[Karen Eastland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it. Loved it. Will read it again.

Burroway has a lovely flow to her writing that takes you on the journey with her. Going with the flow analogy, it is like gently floating along a calm stream. I loved the dish on Plath, and the following quote from the book:

“I went to my GP, a gentle and personable intern in family practice. I wasn’t willing to go back to Dr. By the OBYGN I used to see, I explained, because he had wanted to perform a hysterectomy for no better reason than that, in his opinion, I already had children enough. When I’d told Dr. B. I was not willing to fool around with my psyche in that way, he’d assured me that the loss of a uterus wouldn’t bother me. (Esprit d’escalier: Shall we cut your balls off then? (Burroway 2013 p. 74)”

[Flavia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and clever - hard to put down. I feel sad to have finished it now!

[stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was pretty good, i like burroways voice, but i found that some of the essays dragged on a little. worth a read though.