Home | In Progress | Biography | Reviews | Works | eMessage

 

In All the Rooms of the Yellow House	1984
Plaintext	1986
Remembering The Bone House	1989
Carnal Acts	1990
Ordinary Time	1993
Voice Lessons	1994
Waist-High in the World	1996
A Troubled Guest	2001
Essays Out Loud (CD)	2004

 

---

 

In All the Rooms of the Yellow House - 1984 Blue Moon/Confluence Press winner, 1984 Western States Book Award

In her first full-length collection, Nancy Mairs seeks out the essential spaces and confinements of existence, defined against a ground of both desert and New England imagery by her relationships: with mother and dead father, with husband, daughter, lover, with a striped and a black cat. These form the world/text whose significance, through vision and revision, she picks out painfully in verse and prose. Obliquely, in the grammar of dream, she explores and expands the edges of her life until she can move out of the attic--into which have always been locked the inarticulate disruptive forces labeled madwoman--into the place of her own making: all the rooms of the yellow house. back to top

Plaintext - 1986 University of Arizona Press honorable mention , 1984 Western States Book Award Reviews

What does it mean to be a woman in a patriarchal world-a world where male interests, pursuits, and values create the cultural standards by which human ideas and actions are judged? For Nancy Mairs, this question provides the focus for a riveting collection of essays in which she applies recent feminist concepts to her own life, which has been marked by the effects of multiple sclerosis, depression, and agoraphobia. Walking the line between acceptance and denial of the world, Mairs writes about the joy of romance and the trauma of rape, the despair of institutionalization and the tenderness of motherhood. Ultimately, she shares her love of writing, and does so in prose that demonstrates her already proven talents as a poet. back to top

	Remembering The Bone House an Erotics of Place and Space - 1989 Harper & Row Reviews
	In a new collection of essays, the celebrated author of Plaintext reconstructs her past by exploring her erotic and emotional development in order to lay claim to her life--and women's lives in general. back to top

Carnal Acts - 1990 HarperCollins Publishers Reviews

In this book of essays, Nancy Mairs beautifully portrays her individual difficulties and triumphs as well as the ultimate resilience of the human spirit. With her characteristic blend of startling honesty, wit, and insight, Mairs explores the challenges of living as fully as possible while gradually becoming more and more physically crippled, in order to make sense of, and celebrate, what it is to be human. Written over several years, many of the essays in Carnal Acts focus on what it means to "cope" with multiple sclerosis, the most conspicuous and consuming aspect of Mairs' life. But she offers more than this piece of her experience, revealing her inner life as a writer, wife, and mother and then looking outward to discuss the nature of female discourse (polite and impolite); civil disobedience; and finally, what it is to live full of gratitude and excitement despite the struggles and hardships that are a part of all day-to-day experience. back to top

	Ordinary Time - 1993 Beacon Press New York Times Notable Book Reviews
	Tthis spiritual autobiography of astonishing candor and earthy unsentimentality has something to teach all of us about living. Full of probing intelligence and wry dispassion, Mairs relates her conversion from good-girl spirituality to something much deeper and darker. back to top

	Voice Lessons - 1994 Beacon Press Reviews
	Nancy Mairs shares the sharp, distinctive story of how "finding a voice" as a writer transformed her life when she was a graduate student, wife, and mother in her late thirties. A tribute to the liberating power of feminist ideas and literature. back to top

	Waist-High in the World A Life Among the Nondisabled - 1994 Beacon Press Reviews
	With eloquence, passion, and humor, Nancy Mairs articulates, in a series of ten essays, the realities of a life consigned to gazing at navels other than her own. For years now, with the progression of her multiple sclerosis, Mairs has lived in a wheelchair. From this distinctive perspective, she has written provocatively, courageously, and to great acclaim about marriage, faith, art, and illness. Here she writes about disability and the way it shapes a life. Sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreakingly poignant, this is a book that ultimately celebrates life. back to top
	A Troubled Guest Life and Death Stories - 2001 Beacon Press
	In ten essays recounting such events as the deaths of her parents, the murder of one of her children, the execution of the men on death row whom she corresponds, Nancy Mairs reflects on the ways in which death can inform and even sweeten life. Neither lugubrious nor inspirational, these essays are written to readers looking for some sustenance tarter and tougher than chicken soup—grapefruit, maybe, or rhubarb. This book and the CD Essays Out Loud were supported by a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Initiative of the Project on Death in America, under the auspices of the Open Society Institute. back to top
Essays Out Loud: On Having Adventures & A Necessary End - 2004 Kore Press     Nancy Mairs reads the first essay in her first book of nonfiction, Plaintext, and the first essay in her most recent, A Troubled Guest. CD order form back to top
Home | In Progress | Biography | Reviews | Works | eMessage