This Book Will Change Your Life - Domestic Apparitions by Meg Tuite.

 

Travel. Read. Fast. Amanda Knox. And apparitions. In the air. Cars. On living rooms floors.  We are movement and read and  Domestic Apparitions by the Meg Tuite. It is story as sketch. Family as fragment. Life as a series of disturbances that bounce into one another and congeal. It is also the female experience as filtered through violence and oppression and we recognize that women's experiences are far more wide-ranging than what we're reacting to, that there is love, friendship and family as a nurturing and safe place, but in a world where men endlessly project their sexual and aberrant fantasies onto women, where women's voices have been suppressed historically, and ignored, and continue to be suppressed in ignored in various forms in the literary world and beyond, these stories need to be told, highlighted and given a place to be broadcast. And in that way Domestic Apparitions is reminiscent of other work we've had the chance to read recently, books like Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello, Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks and The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli, books that eschew metaphor and magical realism and try to capture something in real time in all its ugliness. Which makes them important and necessary, but aren't reduced by this necessaryness as something merely important, not when these books are this creative, thoughtful and bursting with storytelling talent.    

This Book Will Change Your Life - Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks.

We recently had the chance to read Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks and to say it makes for an intriguing companion piece to Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball or even The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginetta Correli would be most accurate we think. It is memoir as scrapbook, and its pages are filled with shreds of memory, swirling fragments of truths and untruths and the detritus, both physical and emotional, we accumulate across a lifetime. It is beautiful and dissonant. And it just might change your life.