Artifacts
“An exquisite, aching memoir of adolescent girlhood. . . . Treasures await.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.
Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.
Surface Tension
Club Pines
Shadowbox
A Fixed Plot
Mädchenfänger
She’ll Only Come Out at Night
Creepsake
Not Something That’s Gone
Out Line
In the Burn Pile Behind the Old Nobles House
A Pit Is Removed, a Hollow Remains
Alignment
Pull Me Through the Doorway
Acknowledgments
Notes
“An exquisite, aching memoir of adolescent girlhood. . . . Treasures await.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“These experimental essays about place, home, and the failed effort to belong are closely tied to Eastern North Carolina, but will resonate everywhere.”
Shelf Awareness
“Through careful excavation . . . Mahler manages to create a time machine harking back to the simplicity and complexity of adolescence in 1990s America.”
Booklist
“A fun, strange play on nostalgia and belonging that embodies something so middle school that it aches. . . . It’s a lovely and clever book of essays that add up to an intricate depiction of what must surely be everyone’s oddest time.”
The Rumpus
