The Balloonists Book

"Women now face the task not only of finding a form that can express what they have lived, but of finding a way to tell new stories about what they can live. Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the story of a revolutionary marriage has yet to be written. She writes that, "new definitions and a new reality about marriage must be not only lived but narrated." And must they be lived before they are narrated?" (p. 65)

The writing that is most valuable to me right now is the writing that carves out new space for real questions about how to live life (and relate within any moment of it) - space that does not reference form so much as make what it makes. This is an incredibly smart and moving book - beautiful, direct, articulate, investigational, unafraid. It moves you through your own unanswered self one moment at a time, granting enough poetic space to allow for the kind of absorption that real questions require. I feel like I have been looking for this book for a long time - so glad I found it. I should have known it would be this good - EB's essay "The Pain Scale" has been one of my favorite essays to teach for as long as I've known of it. I am really looking forward to her next book, which is coming out in February...