“Reading
Scratched
gave me the feeling of standing very close to a blazing fire. It is that brilliant, that intense, and one of the finest explorations I know of what it means to be a woman and an artist.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of
The Friend
and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
In this bold and brilliant memoir, the acclaimed author of the novel
Museum Pieces
and the collection
Mendocino Fire
explores the ferocious desire for perfection which has shaped her writing life as well as her rich, dramatic, and constantly surprising personal life
.
In the decade between
age twenty-seven and thirty-seven, Elizabeth Tallent published five literary
books with Knopf, her short stories appeared in
The New Yorker,
and she
secured a coveted teaching job at Stanford University. But this extraordinary
start to her career was followed by twenty-two years of silence. She wrote —or
rather published— nothing at all. Why?
is the remarkable
response to that question.
Elizabeth’s story
begins in a hospital in mid-1950s suburban Washington, D.C., when her mother
refuses to hold her newborn daughter, shocking behavior that baffles the
nurses. Imagining her mother’s perfectionist ideal at this critical moment,
Elizabeth moves back and forth in time, juxtaposing moments in the past with
the present in this innovative and spellbinding narrative.
She traces her journey
from her early years in which she perceived herself as “the child whose flaws
let disaster into an otherwise perfect family,” to her adulthood, when
perfectionism came to affect everything. As she toggles between teaching at
Stanford in Palo Alto and the Mendocino coast where she lives, raises her son
Gabriel, and pursues an important psychoanalysis, Elizabeth grapples with the
ferocious desire for perfection which has shaped her personal life and writing
life. Eventually, she finds love and acceptance in the most unlikely place, and
finally accepts an “as is” relationship with herself and others.
Her final triumph is
the writing of this extraordinary memoir, filled with wit, humor, and
heart—a brave book that repeatedly searches for the emotional truth beneath the
conventional surface of existence.