About this ebook
In this brave and beautifully composed tribute to her mother, Minrose Gwin accomplishes something rare in the craft of the memoir: not merely a record of a devastating mother-daughter relationship but a redemptive act of artistic witness. In telling the story of her mentally ill poet mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, Gwin looks to the past and future of a Southern family, exploring personal and cultural malaise while also envisioning the person her mother longed to be—the Erin Taylor that Minrose Gwin never knew.
Erin Taylor wasn't always insane. Her childhood diary from 1930 reveals a cheerful, observant Mississippi girl who steadfastly wished for snow, though, as she wrote, "usually it didn't come. And when it came it didn't stick." As she progressed from a dreamy college student to a young divorcee mother who then remarried, grew middle aged, and began to write and publish poetry, Erin Taylor spiraled deeper and deeper into the psychosis that eventually defined her existence, until her death from ovarian cancer. With searing insight into this difficult life, and compelling introspection into her own relationship with Erin, Gwin searches for her mother amid the poetry, letters, recipes, traffic tickets, newspaper clippings, medical reports, and quixotic lists she left behind.
"Gwin s courageous frankness . . . fully engages the reader, and this is definitely a real-life story we all need to hear." — Booklist
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About the author
Minrose Gwin is the author of three novels: The Queen of Palmyra, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, finalist for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals. In her memoir, Wishing for Snow, she writes about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother's life. Wearing another hat, she has written four books of literary and cultural criticism and history, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, and coedited The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology. Minrose began her career as a newspaper reporter. Since then, she has taught as a professor at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like the characters in Promise, she grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi.
