Life as We Know It: A Collection of Personal Essays from Salon.com

By Jennifer Foote Sweeney

Book Overview

"...these essays are jewels of the unexpected, and in introducing them, I don't want to steal any of their surprise. Suffice it to say that family life...is alive and well, but it is not like anything you ever read about before in your life." -- Jane Smiley, from the foreword The nuclear family peaked in 1960 with 45 percent of the American population. Many decades later, the tidy ensemble is rare. Relationships, baby making, sex, dating, divorce -- they aren't what they used to be. But the mainstream media keeps the reality of American life a secret, only leaking the occasional tidbit to remind us that those in "unconventional" configurations are a sad anomaly to be pitied or ignored. Life As We Know It offers proof in its most engaging form -- the personal essay -- that the big guys have got it wrong. This collection of blunt, lyrical, and often very funny work from award-winning Salon.com tells the true stories about how we live -- of hustling fertility drugs, losing a child, hating dad, and coming to terms with a parent who was the voice of "Frosty the Snowman" on TV. First-time writers and critically acclaimed authors like Amy Bloom, Kathryn Harrison, Susan Straight, and Benjamin Cheever, plumb the familiar to deliver portraits of moments, seasons, and eras that we recognize or long to understand.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743476867
• ISBN13: 9780743476867
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

salon.com

My husband is a great fan of Salon, I got this for him for his birthday, he loves it!

...and Life As I Know It, too

There is something beautifully eerie about the accuracy with which "Life As We Know It" depicts the rhythm of existence and its inherent jarring; one emerges from reading with the sense of having lived more years than chronologically accurate, or at least of having gained the experiential wisdom that would come with those years. This "collection of personal essays" is indeed personal; I had to bind the thing with a rubber band after reading it (something I've never done to a book before), as if it were my own raw material to be shared only when I'd come to terms with its truths.The "Life" section at Salon.com- the source of this collection- claims some of the finest essayists of the genre, as this small volume demonstrates. Inciting outrageous laughter as well as speechless indignation, "Life As We Know It" elucidates some of the most joyful and most painful, rarely shared yet universally occurring experiences. These stories are for anyone to claim; you will feel that you own some of them. As for the stories you hold: you just might learn to claim more of those, too.