The blog Genre Cook Shop posted this snapped photo [credit: Nancy Bea Miller] of the intensely stylish legs of Michelle Herman, one of my clients. I saw this outfit in person at the opening of an exhibition of her husband Glen Holland's paintings in Chelsea a couple of weeks ago, and absolutely concur with the general opinion: "so fabulous."
In a wonderful year, an author publishes a memorable,
moving work that is warmly received by both the literary establishment
and its readers. But what do you call a year when a writer does this
not once, but twice? I don't even know. Michelle Herman published two
exquisite books this year: Dog, a short novel, and The Middle of Everything, a piercing memoir.
More about Michelle + her work just after the jump...
Who among us hasn’t wished, at one time or another, for love? A fresh perspective? An impossibly cute puppy? Jill Rosen, the protagonist of Michelle Herman’s novel, Dog (MacAdam/Cage) gets more than she bargained for when an impulse decision changes her life in the form of a sweet brown mutt named Phil.
Also in 2005, Herman’s powerful meditation on love, loss, friendship and motherhood, The Middle of Everything (University of Nebraska Press) was published. Exploring uncharted territory in the murky waters between childhood, coming-of-age and adulthood among four generations of women, Herman’s first nonfiction book centers on her relationship with her daughter, Grace, for whom she wants to be the perfect mother. Herman fearlessly details her own failings even as she ultimately discovers her capacity for setting the boundaries she has always tried to break through in her own life, from a childhood in Brooklyn to finding her voice as a bohemian writer in 1960s Greenwich Village to motherhood and an academic career in the Midwest.
Michelle Herman is the author of the novel Missing – awarded the Harold U. Ribalow Prize and selected as one of the 25 Best Books of the Year by VLS, the literary supplement of the The Village Voice – as well as the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life, and a memoir, The Middle of Everything. Her work has appeared in publications including the North American Review, Story Quarterly, and the American Scholar, and has been anthologized in such collections as Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America’s New Young Writers and Jewish-American Fiction: A Century of Stories. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, and a major teaching award from Ohio State University, where she has taught since 1988. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, still life painter Glen Holland, and their daughter, Grace. For more, please visit MichelleHerman.com.
Praise for Dog (MacAdam/Cage, 2005):
“Phil the dog is one of the most admirable and engaging male characters you are likely to encounter between the pages of a book this year. His relations with the woman who has the good fortune to share his life are handled with exemplary insight, delicacy, and humor.” – J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Herman...writes with great good humor about a puppy invasion on a lonely life.”
-New York Times Book Review
“Herman's spare novella is a haiku of loneliness and human redemption.”
-Entertainment Weekly
Praise for The Middle of Everything:
“Honest, brave, and humbling, Michelle Herman’s account of striving to become the mother her child needs – one very different from the ideal she’d imagined – is the story of every woman dedicated to sparing her child the pain of her own youth. We want to believe that love doesn’t make mistakes, but Michelle Herman knows the truth: lik water, love assumes the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it.”
-Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss and The Mother Knot
“Displaying a deeply reflective voice, Herman's book creatively weaves her memories of growing up with her observations and anecdotes about her preadolescent daughter's first decade of life. She brings a poet's flair for precise, evocative language and dramatic structure to the business of writing a memoir.”
– Literary Mama
Herman writes about the multifaceted experience of parenting with elegance and hard-earned humility. Herman has a restless mind; she's constantly analyzing every aspect of her relationships with other adults, but somehow overlooks the ways in which her total devotion to Grace and her efforts to "meet [her] every need" would contribute to Grace's inability to individuate from her mother, and lead to a psychological breakdown at age six. With professional help and therapy, Grace emerges from that crisis, but Herman's writing about that period and how her own actions and history contributed to it is poignant and enlightening.”
-Publishers Weekly
“The Middle of Everything is a poignant, provocative, and painful book about one of life’s biggest issues—being a wonderful mother…What is marvelous in the book is that somewhere amid all the recollecting of her past and examining of her daughter’s present comes a conclusion completely fresh and original.”
-The Virginia Quarterly Review
For excerpts of The Middle of Everything, visit LiteraryMama.com:
“Hope Against Hope, Part One”
“Hope Against Hope, Part Two”
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