Autobiography of Childhood
About this ebook
The Combals are not unacquainted with death: they have never quite recovered from the loss of one of them in childhood. And now, on Valentine's Day, they are losing another.
Guddy races to see her sister, Jerry and Bjarne avoid the phone and its news, Jean finds himself on a beach, and Annie fends off her mother's persistent questions about what's happening. And Therese tries to forgive them all before it's too late.
As each is forced to face the news of Therese's impending death, their actions weave a nuanced portrait of a family, of the devastating reach of childhood grief.
What if thinking is all we have at the end of the day? What if how we react really is all we can control? This transcendent first novel from award-winning poet Sina Queyras tells the story of childhood by illustrating six adult minds grappling with it: noticing, reaching, loving and flailing.
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About the author
Sina Queyras is a Montreal/Tiohtià:ke-based writer, professor, editor, and literary organizer. They are the author of multiple poetry collections, a novel, and a book of essays, as well as the founder of the blog Lemon Hound, which was for many years the digital hub of the Canadian poetry scene. Recent work includes Rooms (Coach House Books, 2022), a blend of memoir, poetry, and criticism offering a peek into the defining spaces of the author as a young queer writer, and My Ariel (2017), a collection riffing on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, reimagining, queering, and inhabiting its iconic poems. Queyras was also a co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (2020), which traces the essential feminist poet's innovation, experimentation, and activism across her body of work.
