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Hardcover Pathologies: A Life in Essays Book

ISBN: 1551119307

ISBN13: 9781551119304

Pathologies: A Life in Essays

In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding's life experience--from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. In a suite of essays forming the emotional climax of the book, Olding bravely recounts the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and tells us the story of Maia's difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved.

Written with as much lyricism, detail, and artfulness as the best short stories, the essays in Pathologies provide all the pleasures of fiction combined with the enrichment derived from the careful presentation of fact. Susan Olding is indisputably one of Canada's finest new writers, one who has taken the challenging, much-underused form of the literary essay and made it her own.

Recommended

Format: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

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This Book Opens the Human Heart.

When a pathologist comes home after a day of dissecting dead humans, what is he like? And how would he treat his kid? Susan Olding tells us. The fierce honesty of this book, and its luminous prose, make it hard to put down. This book lays open, in clear and striking words, the distance we all must bridge, to touch the ones we love. And that pathologist's child - when she grows up and is unable to have a child of her own and adopts a ten-month old from an orphanage in China - what would that be like? What if the child has "attachment disorder?" This book offers no excuses. No platitudes. It opens the human heart in all of its beauty and complexity, and offers it to the reader.
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