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Book

Things like the truth : out of my later years

Call Number

  • 921 G467 (OSH)

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Publication Information

Jackson, Mississippi : University Press of Mississippi, [2016]

Physical Description

xi, 240 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Uniform Title

Essays. Selections

Summary

Winner of the National Book Award and the author of numerous highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction, Ellen Gilchrist is also a daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who takes delight in her large, wonderful family. Things like the Truth offers a collection of nonfiction essays about Ellen Gilchrist's life, family, home, work, aging, and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture. This collection brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and family. Essays such as "The Joy of Swimming" reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person, thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery, money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence. -- from dust jacket.

Contents

  • Section One
  • Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas: My Southern home
  • Things like the truth
  • The family
  • Hurricane, 2005, August 26: Testimony of Grandmother Ellen
  • December 29, 2009, Ocean Springs, Mississippi
  • Ode to New Orleans
  • Casting a cold eye
  • January 1, 2010
  • December 29, 2009, Ocean Springs, Mississippi: The mystery of psychotherapy; The mystery of transference; The hardwired banks of the river memory
  • While talking to Gunther Perdigao on January 3, 2010
  • February 13, 2010
  • Section Two
  • Mother, father, ancestors: The people who made me
  • Wyoming, 1976
  • My momma and daddy get married in the Cathedral, Or, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
  • Further in and deeper out (Wyoming)
  • Writing maketh an exact man
  • A store of treasures
  • Living in the shadow of a beautiful mother
  • A memory, the drive-in theatre
  • Summer, a memory
  • Section Three
  • A home in the highland
  • Keeping houses
  • How I learned to love and trust women, since, after all, I am one
  • Fall 2004, The origin of ball games
  • Diamonds, 2006
  • My Paris and My Rome, Part I
  • My Paris and My Romew, Part II
  • Living with light
  • My Paris and My Rome, Part III
  • February 2007, homage to William Shawn
  • Section Four
  • The courts of love
  • An anniversary
  • In praise of the young man
  • Being wooed
  • Writing maketh an exact man, Part II
  • Meditations on divorce
  • The wine dark sea
  • Blessings
  • When I worry I run as fast as I can
  • Pollen, part I
  • Pollen, part II
  • The joy of swimming
  • Behaviorists, Freudians, Jungians, and Zen: A short history of a learning curve
  • How to have a seventy-fifth birthday party that is a surefire success
  • Heaven, a mystical experience in late October in Fayetteville, Arkansas, or, why we need to write and read books until we die, which I no longer fear or dream of understanding
  • Section Five
  • Blessings
  • Christmas past
  • Morality, Part I
  • Proving once again I will do anything for my granddaughters
  • On becoming an ancestor
  • Grandmother, great-grandmother, what next?

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