Description

‘In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, [Christle] excavates the past to expose difficult truths’ Guardian

When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.

During a rare moment of vulnerability, Christle’s mother shares a memory of assault as a child growing up in London. This instant of shock and recognition sends Christle down a rabbit hole into her mother’s past. From Kew Gardens to the British Library and Bloomsbury, Christle’s journey takes her deep into her family mythologies and her own buried memories. All the while, she finds that Virginia Woolf and her writings not only seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that Woolf becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.

In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.

‘Heartbreaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift’ Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers

Publisher Review

Christle’s exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: “There is a difference between bones and a book,” she writes, “but both have at their center a spine.” What results is irreducibly human. IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It’s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! I first fell in love with Heather Christle’s writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle’s narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift — Jessamine Chan * New York Times-bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers * Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life * Patricia Lockwood, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This * Nobody thinks like [Heather Christle], nobody sees the tiny hooks that attach words to words as clearly, or as imaginatively. Her new book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, is as elegant, searching a book of prose as I’ve read in years . . . Like other titans of the ferociously granular observation – Nicholson Baker, Terrance Hayes, Anne Carson leap to mind – Christle has the chops to render flinting eccentric curiosity in delicious, propulsive prose. There’s almost no praise I wouldn’t extend to In the Rhododendrons — Kaveh Akbar * Electric Literature * With lyrical prose, a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt * Publishers Weekly * In the Rhododendrons [is] a moving and fascinating exploration both of [Christle’s] own life and of the process of reading and re-learning the past . . . a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other . . . beautiful * Booklist * In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, [Christle] excavates the past to expose difficult truths * Guardian * Christle copes by weaving her revelations into discussions of history, culture, literature and geography so that the story reads like a discursive conversation with a friend . . . All of these details are fascinating, mesmerizing even, and Christle delivers them with a light touch, reminding me of Virginia Woolf herself * Washington Post * Meditative, analytic, and heartfelt… Christle exudes a refreshing approach to imagination – one that involves reconstructing unlikely human connections… Mesmerizing and at times whimsical, this book brings readers on a journey beyond linear time and across continents, all for the sake of finding comfort and beauty in the garden of words * Booklist *