Böcker av Marcia Aldrich

In Studio of the Voice, master essayist Marcia Aldrich is at her finest as she invites readers along for a personal exploration of women's lives. The essays take on dazzling forms-each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.

Girl Rearing is the story of girlhood in the fifties, the pent-up desire, the isolation by gender, the trials between mother and daughter. The last of four daughters, the narrator grows up in the wake of tragedy - her sister's death by drowning - and under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture, and feminine destiny. The narrator is destined to rebel. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.

When Aldrich's friend took his own life, they had known each other many years. With this work, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend's intentions. Intimate and austere, clear eyed and tender, this innovative work creates a new form in which to experience grief, remembrance, and reconciliation.