A Lifetime Burning

by Ellen Douglas

At age 62, Corinne must grapple with the most painful truth that her lifelong passion--which is anyone's passion, to love and be loved, body and soul--could burn unquenched forever. Gripping, smart, suspenseful, and at times, wonderfully witty, Douglas's widely acclaimed novel forms a searching and searing record of love, anger, confession and discovery.

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Ellen Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest settlements in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Her fiction has won many prizes, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

Reviews

[Whitney]

I wanted to read Ellen Douglas because she was a pretty noteworthy Mississippi writer in her time (60s-80s)—and she lived in Mississippi (!)—but nobody on my radar talks about her anymore. This as the first book I read of hers was really interesting until the very last page, and in many ways is something I’d recommend to a lot of my friends who read contemporary literary fiction. Queerness comes up against traditional “family values,” and the book is really a bit modern in its meditation on being stuck in/creating happiness within that upper middle class status quo way of life centered on a heterosexual marriage and kids. It’s also a sort of spiraling unreliable narrator tale with an anti-masculine structure. And talks a lot about sex around age 60. It’s interesting to read a white MS writer who’s not part of the gothic tradition. Well, the narrator does unearth an old diary from an attic at one point, and she does sort of investigate the past like you do…so maybe nevermind.

There are moments, peppered throughout, where a racist turn of phrase or an anecdote related purely as background made me cringe quite strongly; I’ve seen similarly casually deployed language violence in plenty of other white Mississippi writers’ books. Just wanted to clarify that this is absolutely there in this book.

[Treasure Island Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what to say about this book. On the one hand, it was a good story. A 62-year-old woman writes a journal-style narrative of her marriage and her life. On the other hand, the woman is a very unreliable narrator. Sometimes she tells a detailed story about herself, a family member she didn't know, or a neighbor, and then she turns around and says that's not what happened at all. Many of the people she tells about suffer from some mental condition that makes them do odd and dangerous things. It's difficult to say whether her own craziness stemming from her obsession with her husband's lover is real or imagined. If the woman were writing the account for her children as she claimed, they would have been confused.

[Jaimie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd actually like to give this book 2 and 1/2 stars. It's better than ok, but did I like it? I liked parts. But in the end I definitely felt like the narrator was totally unreliable and had the unusual feeling that the other had just put several failed novel attempts into her narrator's hands.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. Unusual structure. Short. Good book.