Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak

By Joan Weimer

Joan Weimer had spent three years researching the life of nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson for a critical biography when a devastating back injury left her virtually immobile. Pain reshaped her research as she discovered more about Woolson's writing, family, and grief. The imaginative relationship she developed with Woolson--chronicled in this heart-felt book-- helped Weimer to escape her physical disability as she wrestled with the question of how to redefine herself.

In this elegant, humorous, and brutally frank memoir, Weimer's discoveries--documentative and imaginative, historical and personal--reveal much about what motivates research, and what motivates healing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226884155
• ISBN13: 9780226884158
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A candid and highly intelligent account of personal growth

This memoir recounts the personal evolution of a highly accomplished professor of literature forced to confront a debilitating health crisis involving her back. As a result she questions the path she has taken in life, examining with relentless candor her own past. At the same time, her obsession with a nineteenth century literary figure, Constance Fenimore Woolson, leads her on an unpredictable and surprising course of speculation on matters of spirituality, feminism, and personal psychology. The author's intelligence, humor, determination, and sheer literary skill take this memoir well beyond the usual inspirational new age stuff, and the result is a fine meditation on the coming together of many forces that refocus and redefine her sense of self.