Why am I passionate about this?
I love realm of the sensual. I sometimes call it The Magic Kingdom—the experience that sets us apart from our childhoods and teenage years. Intimacy—not just with people or lovers, but with the stuff we love as adults—is a compelling quest. For me, it lives in writing, cooking, singing, painting, befriending, loving—the things that lift my life out of the ordinary into time-stopping moments. Sharing it my writing, especially in my new fiction (Stay with Me, Wisconsin and my upcoming novel The Seven Mile Bridge) has been an experience of helping us all get our hands and hearts and skin into the things we love and then abide there as long as life allows us.
Joanneh's book list on sensual fiction (that doesn’t leave out the good stuff)
Why did Joanneh love this book?
Anthropology of an American Girl is the beautiful tale of Eveline, who lives on Long Island with her barely-making it divorced mom in a wealthy Hamptons town in the late 1970s and 1980s.
It’s a coming-of-age story of finding her independence and need, best described in her own musings: she reveals that her parents loved her but were unaware of her need in the world to be shepherded and helped; to be supported.
They needed her to be instantly independent, even as a teenager, but that didn't make it so; because they didn’t have the bandwidth to see she needed direction, didn’t mean she knew where she was going.
Living through her love of a working-class boxer—a true love that she can’t quite put aside, even as he leaves her for a career—then moving in with a man she’s settled for—a hip, rich, self-centered man that she’s let herself fall…
1 author picked Anthropology of an American Girl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
This is what it’s like to be a high-school-age girl.
To forsake the boyfriend you once adored.
To meet the love of your life, who just happens to be your teacher.
To discover for the first time the power of your body and mind.
This is what it’s like to be a college-age woman.
To live through heartbreak.
To suffer the consequences of your choices.
To depend on others for survival but to have no one to trust but yourself.
This is Anthropology of an American Girl.
A literary sensation, this extraordinarily candid novel about the experience of growing up…