Ordinary Paradise a Memoir

By Laura Furman

Ordinary Paradise offers the moving story of a young girl's reaction to the early loss of her mother with its persisting consequences, as they affect choices the author has made with regard to her own family and future. Laura Furman was thirteen-and-a-half years old at the time her mother died, swiftly and without explanation, from ovarian cancer, thus creating a rupture in the landscape of what had been a happy childhood that the author equates with the Great Rift Valley of Africa. In a family where no one spoke about anything messy or uncomfortable, the result was a repression of mourning to the point where the author felt that her own mother's existence was being obliterated: "Now it was as if she'd never existed--and if she hadn't existed, then I did not." The difficulties that ensue, like the earlier description of happier times when Laura's mother was alive, are expressed in the clean, precise, supple style that has distinguished Furman's previous books. The book is not bitter; rather, this is a voyage of attempted understanding--honest and realistic in its depiction of the self-absorption of the surrounding adult world; heartbreaking in detail, but ultimately victorious as its heroine strives to possess the experience wholly for the first time, as a mother and wife. It is a powerful rendering of the effect upon the soul of an artist of the silences that often characterize a family's reaction to crisis. Giving the memoir a contemporary focal point is the controversial decision made by the author in response to the statistical probability that she would follow her mother and grandmother into an early death. "No one spoke to me about the hereditary possibility of ovarian cancer but the bond I felt with my mother linked me with her disease. . . . Inside my abdomen (waited) patient black space that was not me and would be the end of me." This decision addresses issues of a woman's identity in a poignant fashion that the reader will never forget.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965746844
• ISBN13: 9780965746847
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Winedale Publishing
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Anyone who has suffered loss will be touched by this memoir.

Laura Furman's "Ordinary Paradise" will touch anyone who has ever suffered loss, and will be almost as meaningful to someone who has been lucky--thusfar--to have escaped loss. Furman herself, a novelist with a spare yet poetic style, paces her memoir with all the narrative skill of someone who knows how to tell a story: what to say, and what not to say. Although the story deals with the central event in her life--the death of her mother from ovarian cancer when Furman was thirteen--it never succumbs to tearfulness, narcissism, or any form of self-indulgence. It takes a cold and sober look at life. As she admits at the very start, this is not a story with spine-tingling events: "Nothing out of the ordinary happened. My father did not molest me. My stepmother did not send me into the woods with a hired killer." This is not the stuff of tawdry daytime tv shows. Instead, it is about the loss of ordinary family happiness and the hard-won effort to piece together a whole life after decades of family repression and denial. The paradoxical title tells us much: all paradises are eventually lost, but some can be re-gained. The best ones are those that allow us the freedom and the happiness to live, love, and grow under perfectly ordinary conditions. These are the conditions of happy family life, and it is to Furman's credit that although fearful of the same fate her mother met at an early age (we now know much more about the genetic predisposition of some people to cancers) she has been able to achieve the "ordinary paradise" that for decades she thought she would never have. She has won it through common sense, good luck, persistence, clear-headedness, patience and labor. She has made art out of her life, and made of her life a work of art.