Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf

In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf

Christle, Heather

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresSelf-Help

Publisher Price: $27.00

ISBN10: 1643755927
ISBN13: 9781643755922
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell's Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers--as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics--the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Book crafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing.

When Heather Christle realizes 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.

On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Christle's mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.

Her private, British mother's revelation--a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship--propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England's sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's birthday hill in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother's story, but also that the author 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.

Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, 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.

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