This is my first post on the forum.  Thanks for allowing me to join you all.  I'm an author and a reader and was invited to submit a book review.  I chose Glenda Burgess's new memoir.  I hope you'll look for it and also come meet me on December 3rd at A Book For All Season's party time!

The Geography of Love  A Memoir, by Glenda Burgess, Broadway Books (Random House) August, 2008.

I had the privilege of meeting Glenda Burgess last month when we shared the stage at Portlands WordStock Festival.  Glenda is the author of several novels as well as works on the arts and philosophy.  Shes won the Rupert Hughes Award for Literary Fiction among other distinctions.  In Portland, she read from her newly released memoir TheGeography of Love beginning with a scene with her father, a physicist and military man, talking about the nature of stardust.  Shes a young girl and has asked her father what makes stars shoot and silently hopes he will take her question seriously and tell her the truth.

This scene sets the tone for this exceptional memoir for memoir is above all about truth, about the authors truth told in a way that honors the truths of others within that story and yet distinguishes the uniqueness of the authors story as truly her own.  I started reading this book in the evening, picked it up early the next morning and read through the day.  It felt like a gift I gave myself.  Beautiful imagery, a depth of human emotion without sentimentality infused with insight and grace:  Its what writing ought to be, a truly moving experience about the truths we tell ourselves and how they shape our lives.

Yes, there were some parallels with my own life:  a husband several years older, his two previous marriages, step-children issues, even an unsolved murder hovering over a relationship.   And then the cancer:  that too worked its way into my own married life.  Yet the authors poignant exploration of these issues allows the reader who might never have experienced any of these challenges to gain wisdom.  This womans courage allows her to tell the truth about our fears, our hopes, our perseverance as we are carved by the landscapes of risking love and grief.  One doesnt need to have experienced any of the challenges to be moved by the journey were invited into through this memoir and that, as a reader, marks the genius of this authors work: it touches each of us in different places but always in the heart. 

Glendas story of self-discovery begins as she returns to Spokane after a career in the state department.  Seeking a true sense of home, wanting to reconnect with her mother who lives in the area and a sister not far away, she comes home to the west.  There she meets and falls in love with Ken.  They enjoy the fruits of a friendship in marriage, two great kids, a life full.  Then Glendas mother is diagnosed with cancer followed a few weeks later by Kens deteriorating health that ultimately is discovered to be cancer as well.  The mix of family constellations, the ways in which each of us deals with what I call the wilderness places of our lives, is intricately woven into this story set against the landscape of Eastern Washington.

Joan Didion earned the Pulitzer for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking in which she chronicles the aftermath of her husbands sudden death.   I think Glendas work is as exceptional and has the additional merit of weaving the geography of our beloved Western places into the geography of heart.  The word geography actually translates as land geo and writing graphy.    In her memoir, Spokane-based writer Glenda Burgess has written the landscape of a relationship and as readers we are privileged to participate on that hopeful journey.

I was reminded while reading this work of a physics theorem known as Bells Theorem.  When two elementary particles merely brush against each other they are each forever changed no matter how far apart in time or space they separate.  Im sure physicists hate it when literary types co-opt their scientific certainties, but this theorem is perfectly suited for Ms Burgesss memoir for any reader who brushes against  her truth and will be forever changed.

Oh, yes, the answer to the shooting star question?  Just a bit of chance and chaos, Sunshine, he said.  Atoms that dance.    

Submitted by Jane Kirkpatrick