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The Part That Burns Kindle Edition

by Jeannine Ouellette (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 226 ratings
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"I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." —Dorothy Allison, New York Times best-selling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller
"Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." —Joyce Carol Oates
"A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself and create her own sheltering family. But she cannot know how the visceral reality of both birth and babies will pull her back into the body she long ago abandoned, revealing new layers of pain and desire, and forcing her to choose between her idealistic vision of perfect marriage and motherhood, and the birthright of her own awakening flesh, unruly and alive. The Part That Burns is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.
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  1. Print length
    178 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publication date
    January 31, 2021
  5. File size
    2077 KB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty. ~Kirkus, starred review

I love this book and am grateful it is in the world. ~Dorothy Allison, New York Times bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller


Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid. ~Joyce Carol Oates

At turns tender and devastating, these essays are finely carved vignettes that, laid together, form a powerful portrait of one woman's path from hard girlhood to motherhood, the grace and mettle it takes not only to survive but to flourish. ~Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me and Girlhood


Tell all the truth but tell it slant, said Emily Dickinson -- another way of describing what Ouellette accomplishes here. All the truth, and many slants, like the angles of sun through the hours of a day. ~Marion Winik, Minneapolis StarTribune


Powerful and urgent, this is truly a book for our time: It teases beauty out of ugliness; it shows the courage of everyday survival; it creates wholeness out of fragments. With her gorgeous and precise prose, Ouellette shows that when faced with abuse we can do more than merely endure - we can fight back, we can flourish, we can thrive. ~Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

Jeannine Ouellette's memoir glows with incandescent storytelling centered around memories, motherhood, and resilience. The Part That Burns proves that life isn't lived in a linear way. Girlhood and womanhood can exist simultaneously, our former selves meeting our present selves. Ouellette's writing is ablaze with a burnished beauty. ~Michele Filgate, author, editor of What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

With a poet's voice and an uncanny knack for mining memory, Ouellette's memoir-in-fragments evokes pain and beauty in equal measure. Ouellette understands the elliptical nature of memory, the way years and experience can transform our understanding of the things we did as children and the things that were done to us. She loops back and forth in time to the same seminal experiences, adding layers of depth and understanding, and in so doing shows us how her wild determination to overcome the trauma of her childhood results in a life lived on her own terms. Full of love, loss, and hard-won redemption, The Part That Burns is a fiercely beautiful memoir. ~Alison McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Opposite of Fate and Someday


In The Part that Burns, Jeannine Ouellette has gifted an entrancing and courageous story to those who have ever felt forced to silence memories of childhood sexual abuse. She is a child, searching wild, unending landscapes for doorways to other dimensions of understanding and safety. She is a young wife, then a young mother, hypnotically looping back again and again to make sense of the memories that won't let her go. Like lacy tumbleweeds finally uprooted and taking to air, this too is a story of flight. Her flight on black-as-space country roads; her flight to reach a faraway mother figure who once said she cared; and the flight of her deepest-down words, finally taking to air for those who must hear them. This is a story about giving voice to all the pieces of one's life, rendered with devastating beauty, heart, and artistry. ~ Diane Zinna, author of The All-Night Sun

About the Author

Jeannine Ouellette's work has appeared widely in journals including North American Review, Narrative, Calyx, Masters Review, Writer's Chronicle, december, and others, as well many anthologies such as Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men, Nowhere Print Annual, Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, and Feminist Parenting. She has received fellowships from Millay Colony and Brush Creek, and her stories and essays have won recognition from the Narrative Story Contest, Masters Review fiction contest, Calyx's Margarita Donnelly Award for Prose, december's Curt Johnson Prose Award, and more. Jeannine lives in Minneapolis near the banks of the Mississippi, where she teaches writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the University of Minnesota, as well as through Elephant Rock, the independent writing program she founded in 2012.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08VHY41VG
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Split/Lip Press (January 31, 2021)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 31, 2021
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2077 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 178 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 226 ratings

About the author

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Jeannine Ouellette

Jeannine Ouellette

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Jeannine Ouellette is the author of the memoir The Part That Burns (Split/Lip Press, 2021), the children’s book Mama Moon, and several educational titles. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, and her work has been supported with fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts and Brush Creek Foundation. She is the recipient of a Margarita Donnelly Prize, Curt Johnson Fiction Award, Proximity Essay Award, Masters Review Emerging Writer's Award, two recent Pushcart nominations, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Medill School of Journalism. Her work has been praised by Joyce Carol Oates as "simply beautiful, precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." Jeannine teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and is the founder and director of Elephant Rock, an independent creative writing program in Minneapolis. She earned her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on her first novel.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
226 global ratings
Some Books are Diamonds
5 Stars
Some Books are Diamonds
The Part That Burns is exquisitely rendered. Reading it is like sitting on a sunlit beach as the tide comes in, goes out, comes in again... until the reader is washed in the healing balm of strength and beauty. Adversity and trauma, rather than assaulting the reader, are burned away until nothing is left but the flame of spirit, shining gold. This book is a lesson in beauty and truth. But it is also an example of the craft and artistry that is only achieved by the best memoirists.
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Top reviews from the United States

dawn denham
5.0 out of 5 stars A smart, expertly crafted memoir full of grace and generosity you will not want to put down!
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2021
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This is my favorite book I’ve read all year.
It’s exactly the kind of writing I feel totally consumed by and which fulfills me. It’s the kind of book I wish I could write. It’s the kind of writing I aspire to. Why? The style and sentences are so good. So strong. Clear and crisp. I see everything and know everything I need to know. Such care. And more than this, I adore the way these images and events resonate, speak back to each other to make meaning. I am immensely satisfied by the metaphor. What makes all this and so much more work so well is that Ouellette encapsulates the emotional, physical, psychological import of the story (ies) in these searing lines. Especially at the end of chapters, you get these sentences to bring it all together with a gut punch. It’s poetry, it’s condensed language so distilled and undeniable in its meaning. I was surprised and grateful every single time she let me take this kind of layered journey through meaning. The way the prose, sentence by sentence, conveys everything that’s happening AND what the author/narrator thinks and feels about it all at once. I so admire the craft and thoughtfulness here.
The craft is stunning throughout. The movement of the narrator’s voice from a child through to her adult self is clear and compelling and believable. Because the craft is so deft, she infuses the lines of the young girl with the knowing woman’s point of view.
This reader is moved and humbled by the ways in which Ouellette writes love and about her children—real and believable and tenacious and wild love for her children is utterly beautifully expressed.
I really hope more and more people read this book. It’s art and it reaches us. A smart and artful writer I will want to read again and again.
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Maryswriting
5.0 out of 5 stars Read NOW – Unique, Engaging Memoir By A Brilliant StoryTeller
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2021
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“Expectations can be slippery” – From the first page, this book had me hooked. Expect to read it all the way through in one sitting, expect your heart to be broken, and then put back together, piece by beautiful piece. Expect every word to be carefully chosen by a writer who elevates her craft into a literal wonder – I was breathless with excitement and worry as the author makes her way alone to Mexico as a teenager, I was transfixed by her journey through childhood – the author threads wonder and innocence into a young life marred by continuous trauma. If you loved “In The Dream House” by Carmen Machado or “The Edge of Every Day” by Marin Sandy, you will love this compelling, fractured, formative book. My heart traveled with the author from the middle to the beginning to the end to the in-between – like a child running back and forth, trying to catch the ball and leave the middle, Jeannine Ouellette shows the reader precisely how it feels to be a child experiencing trauma, a young woman in a body which was never all the way protected, and a full-grown adult reclaiming her rights to her truth, her voice, and her version of a beautiful life. She takes her literal gifts, hones them into descriptive needles, then pokes, prods, and explores all the places trauma is felt – she goes under the skin I swear! As a survivor, I admire the bravery of this author, who is willing to tell it all without turning away from the scariest reveals so the reader can feel and heal all the way through.

Of her dysfunctional family units, the author says, “first and foremost, they taught me to want more”

First and foremost, this book taught me to want more books and stories from Jeannine Ouellette.
3 people found this helpful
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Lisa Ellison
5.0 out of 5 stars A Gripping, Searing Work of Art
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2021
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Trauma seers into our nervous systems where it smolders only to flare again when we face life’s many triggers.

In her memoir The Part that Burns, Jeannine Ouellette artfully and lyrically captures this experience. Her beautiful story of pain, longing, and love stayed with me long after I put her book down. I was haunted in all the right ways by her characters and her use of structure and metaphor which capture experiences that often defy language.

While her subject matter is challenging, she handles it gracefully, never revealing gratuitous details nor asking too much of the reader. She uses structure to create a powerful container for her experiences, which as a trauma survivor, made me feel both held and deeply understood. I was struck by the level of resilience she captures as well as the fierce love she writes about, given everything that happens to the narrator.

Reading her story was a gift that was both entertaining and instructive. I highly recommend this book.
One person found this helpful
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Norma Jean
4.0 out of 5 stars a sad life story
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2022
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Really liked how she wrote with detail about her feelings and really wanted to cry for her.
What was not very good was how she repeated parts of her life where I thought my Kindle was going back in pages.
It’s a good book for anyone read
2 people found this helpful
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RosieWriteOn
5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic, heart-healing book
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2022
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This book sat on my shelf for months before I read it - I think I was afraid of being traumatized by the subject matter. But this lovely book had the opposite effect! I read it while going through challenges and problems within my own family, and it honestly soothed my soul. Her luminous writing and wise, gorgeous words seems to be a letter of love from one struggling woman/mother to another. I see writers such as this one as healers in their own right- they are sending missives of poetic insight to other struggling humans through the medium of literature. Bravo, and thank you.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Chalfont
5.0 out of 5 stars Finding one's way to the horizon.
Reviewed in Japan on January 26, 2021
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A poetic memoir with a strong voice and engaging prose. A meditation on trauma: embracing the gifts it tries to take from us, and strengths we reluctantly receive from it.
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