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About A Troubled Guest...
Commonweal
A few years ago I met Mairs and her husband in Tucson. I will not forget her wonderful, extravagant hat and her love of good talk. I had already read Ordinary Time with admiration; she was at the time working on her perceptively titled book about life as a disabled person, Waist-High in the World. This book is every bit as good as the previous two. Is she a spiritual writer? You'd better believe it. Lawrence S. Cunningham
Booklist
Mairs, a master essayist, writes with clarity and assurance, rendering complex and hard-won perceptions into graceful and resonant prose, taking as her subjects the most frightening and difficult of life's offerings. In Waist-High in the World (1997), she wrote about living with MS. Here she writes of death, explaining that her interest lies in the "desire to understand the role of affliction in perfecting human experience," and Mairs knows of what she writes. Each essay is rooted in personal experience: the death of her young father when she was a girl, her witnessing her mother's death five decades later, her stepfather's death shortly thereafter, her own suicide attempt, and, in an unplanned coda, her foster son's murder. Mairs parses the meaning of rituals, the preciousness and unreliability of memories, and the ethical questions associated with assisted death and capital punishment. Unfailingly frank and balanced, she admits to her ambivalence even as she seeks the high moral road, ultimately celebrating all of life and our endless quest to understand it. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association.
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About Waist-High in the World...
Amazon.com
Nancy Mairs, a gifted essayist who is fierce and funny by turns, landed in a wheelchair years ago due to degenerative multiple sclerosis that has sapped much of her strength. She bends an agile mind and sharp tongue around the daily tasks of seeing eye-to-navel with a world that clearly prefers nondisabled "normals." One candid, pained essay tells of longing to give care, not just accept it. Others describe the shifting line in the sands marking limits she could live with; teeth-grinding frustration at foolish building practices that keep even public bathrooms out of her reach; and a discomforting adventure as an undercover agent exposing a drug fraud aimed at people with diseases like MS.
Booklist
Acclaimed essayist Mairs is revered for her lucidity, humor, literary finesse, and freedom from sentimentality, stellar qualities that shape every page of this upbeat account of life in a wheelchair. Mairs has coped with multiple sclerosis for more than two decades, and there isn't any aspect of her illness and its impact both on daily life and on the soul that she hasn't pondered and learned from. She declares that a life like hers, "commonly held to be insufferable, can be full and funny," but Mairs would be the first to admit that she has been fortunate within the context of her misfortune. Her illness does not keep her from writing, and writing enables her to come to terms with her fate. Mairs is also blessed with a loving husband and family, and some of the most resonant sections in this generous and illuminating volume consider both the giving and the receiving of care. Mairs' physical view of the world may be waist-high, but her intellectual and spiritual range is limitless. Donna Seaman
Kirkus Reviews
Ten more striking essays from the remarkable author of Ordinary Time (1993) and Voice Lessons (1994). A bare-bones description of Mairs's situation--she has severe multiple sclerosis that is progressively worsening, and her caretaker husband has cancer with an uncertain prognosis- -might well deter the reader anxious to avoid either a depressing soap opera or a sentimental feel-good book. Happily, this is neither. "I ask you to read this book," says Mairs, "not to be uplifted, but to be lowered and steadied into what may be unfamiliar, but is not inhospitable, space." With wit, wisdom, and candor she contemplates the body and world she inhabits. Among her concerns are sex, language, mobility, the rights of the disabled, caregiving and caretaking, euthanasia, and abortion, especially the implications for the disabled of the right to abort a fetus known to be defective. There's a certain amount of adventure here too, for which Mairs's wry tone is wonderfully apt. When she takes part in an undercover operation to gather evidence concerning a scam to bilk thousands of dollars from MS victims, truth and justice are among the losers. When she and her husband and daughter decide to take a week's vacation in New Mexico in a rental vehicle soon dubbed "the Camper from Hell," the results are both poignant and comic. Perhaps the most unforgettable adventure, if one can call it that, is a day she spends alone when caretaking arrangements fall apart. Such seemingly simple tasks as taking a shower and fixing a lunch are revealed to be, for her, astonishingly intricate undertakings. At one point Mairs asserts that "this is no piteously deprived state I'm in down here but a rich, complicated, and utterly absorbing process of immersion in whatever the world has to offer." What she offers here is a rich, startling, and utterly absorbing view of that world. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Library Journal
With eloquence, passion, and humor, Mairs articulates, in a series of ten essays, the realities of a life "consigned to gazing at navels other than my own." . . .[a] powerful, beautifully written book . . .highly recommended. Kate Kelly
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About Voice Lessons ...
Book News, Inc.
Mairs' sharp, revealing essays are concerned with the process of women becoming writers. Her first essay describes how her experience of "finding her voice" as an essayist transformed her life when she was a graduate student, wife, and mother in her late 30s. In a tribute to the liberating power of literature and feminist ideas, she explores other women's writing, showing how their work helped ground her own love of literature and writing; other essay subjects include writing and the body, the challenges of autobiography, the "literature of personal disaster," and the art of dealing with rejection. Not indexed. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or
Booklist
Mairs is a remarkable writer who offers far more than just inspiration to other women aspiring to write. In these autobiographical essays she is attentive to her own creative process, sharing with readers the influences that led to her development as a writer. Yet these musings are devoid of pretensions. Even as Mairs acknowledges the particular melding of "creative" and "critical" genres revealed in her work, she quietly (by example) blows apart the academic notions of "forms" or categories of writing. Bouts with depression and the reality of living with multiple sclerosis figure among the conditions of this writer's life, but for her readers, candor and generosity of spirit coupled with an incisive feminist consciousness add up to an exhilarating foray into uncharted waters. Alice Joyce
Kirkus Reviews
A delightful collection of essays on becoming a writer, by the author of Ordinary Time (1993), which draws from literature, feminism, psychoanalysis, and life experience. Mairs's writing is a hybrid form of essay that can be both intellectual and abstract, as well as intimately autobiographical. "I found my writing voice, and go on finding it...by listening to the voices around me, imitating them, then piping up on my own,'' says Mairs, who began to find her voice as a writer only in her 30s when she was already a graduate student, married, a mother, and a survivor of a bout of depression that landed her in a mental institution. It was then that she began to listen "to the words and intonations of women as women.'' The sources of her literary feminist awakening included the writings of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. But this slim volume is no academic tome. Her essays are grounded in experiences that are particular to her life--living with MS, or smaller moments such as a visit to a psychic who refuses to "read'' her. In "The Literature of Personal Disaster,'' which first appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Mairs writes from the singular vantage point of a woman who, having written about her own MS and suicidal depression, as well as her husband's cancer, is now frequently asked to review works in this "sub-genre.'' She snappily takes on the harsh critics of these books, saying, "The narrator of personal disaster, I think, wants not to whine, not to boast, but to comfort...it is possible to be both sick and happy. This good news, once discovered, demands to be shared." Voice Lessons should be both a comfort and a spiritual guide to women writers in search of their own "voices." Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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About Ordinary Time...
Kirkus Reviews This is no ordinary book. A "spiritual companion'' to Remembering the Bone House (1989), it continues Mairs's intensely personal interior journey as it explores issues of faith and social conscience with edgy honesty and poise. Most often, Mairs begins, religious belief is something you keep to yourself, but, in any case, life forces the construction of a moral sense, however haphazard its defining moments. The author's own convictions evolved gradually, along with a creeping feminism, until both she and husband George left behind the comfortable shelter of Protestant childhood labels and celebrated a Mass marking their conversion to Catholicism. Now they belong to the Community of Christ of the Desert and pursue the social-justice commitment articulated by Leonardo Boff, making political choices independent of official Church policy. Theirs is a spiritual quest, a profound collaboration, a willed engagement with people in need: "God was here, and the law was unembellished: take care of each other." Mairs's theology is by no means traditional, with unusual references to God ("she," always) and a stance that's "both pro-choice and anti-abortion," but her expression of religious belief is a powerful statement presented, as in previous books, in the context of family history and ongoing calamity--George's third bout with melanoma, her own increased physical deterioration from MS. Surpassing earlier efforts, she writes with extraordinary grace of "memory's malarial tenacity," of "the passionate tenderness children evoke" in their caregivers, or of the approach of death as "a kind of conversion experience." Consoling and poignant: a Catholic feminist moral inquiry that resists New Age simplifications and shares its message of deep faith with courage and dignity. Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Amazon.com This is a very important and useful book for me. Nancy writes essays about her life from a spiritual perspective. She includes everything that is important in her life: conversion, prayer, sickness, family life, finances, the poor in spirit and health. I was raised as a Catholic and spent 35 years away so I can relate to Nancy's comments about the difference between the church hierarchy and the people. They each have different needs and actions. I prefer the people and have learned to diminish my strong feelings of criticism of the church hierarchy so that it doesn't keep me from being one of the church people and taking care of my spiritual needs. This is one of the most important books that I have read. Len Kreidermacher back to top |
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About Carnal Acts...
Amazon.com
This collection offers some of the most insightful prose on the topic of selfhood, femininity, coming to terms with body image, religion, chronic illness -- you name it. Nancy Mairs is an Emerson for the nineties. She's never written a dishonest sentence or a boring piece. Read her NOW. Recommend her to your friends. It will change your life. Julia Sullivan
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About Plaintext...
medicalprose.com
This is a collection of essays about living. Nancy Mairs has multiple sclerosis. Her essay, "On Being a Cripple" is an unvarnished look at disability, with all its difficulty, embarassment, enlightenment and humor. It provides a fascinating and humane look at living with an illness. "On Living Behind Bars" chronicles Mairs' six months in a state psychiatric hospital. It is both searing and illuminating. Mairs is a talented essayist. Besides her contributions to the understanding of medicine, her succint expository style offers guidance to writers-in-training.
Amazon.com
I've read only a few of Mairs' essays from this volume, and the ones I've read are beautifully crafted. Nancy Mairs hates having MS, yet she is not sorry to be a cripple (a term she prefers to handicapped or disabled.) How can this be? Nancy Mairs reveals her life as it is lived day-to-day, as a married, employed, active, wife, mother, and, most importantly, woman and human being. Her style and tone is such that even those unconnected to any kind of disability or disabled person will be profoundly moved by her autobiographical essays. A reader from Carle Place, New York
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