Works
A
Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith
Paperback (2008)
A Dynamic God explores through beautifully written personal essays the question of why and how Mairs became and remains a Catholic ("despite all odds"); what she finds to love in that tradition; and more broadly, as she writes, how she experiences the holy in her life and in the world.
In her unmistakable, vibrant voice, at once nonconformist and devotional, Mairs offers a book not only for progressive Catholics seeking to reimagine their lives of faith, but for all readers hoping to deepen their experience of the holy in the everyday: "God is here."
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Essays
Out Loud: On Having Adventures & A Necessary End
Audio CD (2004)
Essays Out Loud features two essays written a few years apart and read aloud by the author. Mairs's "On Having Adventures" and "A Necessary End" deal with issues of joy, disability, and death; written from the perspective of a severely disabled person with multiple sclerosis, a recent convert to Catholicism, and a wife and mother. Achingly authentic, Mairs decisively catalogs theological and psychological aspects of her world in gutsy and succinct prose.
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A
Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
Paperback (2002)
A focused personal and ethical examination of life in the face of death, by one of our most acclaimed essayists.
In ten essays recounting such events as the deaths of her parents, the murder of one of her children, the execution of the men on death row whom she corresponds, Nancy Mairs reflects on the ways in which death can inform and even sweeten life. Neither lugubrious nor inspirational, these essays are written to readers looking for some sustenance tarter and tougher than chicken soup—grapefruit, maybe, or rhubarb.
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Waist-High
in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled
Paperback (1997)
In a blend of intimate memoir and passionate advocacy, Nancy Mairs takes on the subject woven through all her writing: disability and its effect on life, work, and spirit.
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Voice
Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer
Paperback (1997)
Voice Lessons is a book about writing from a woman with a remarkable story to tell and an utterly distinctive voice in which to tell it. Mairs's subjects are literary, but as always her approach is personal, revealing, and inspiring. Mairs first shares her sharply drawn story on how "finding a voice" as an essayist transformed her life when she was a graduate student, wife, and mother in her late thirties. In a tribute to the liberating power of literature and feminist ideas, she shows how the words of other writers made possible a new career, a new life in difficult times. Voice Lessons goes on to explore other women's writing and to outline a singular kind of literary life. Always grounding her writing in personal experience, always making ideas concrete, Mairs gives us essays on writing and the body, the challenges of autobiography, the revelatory power of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, the literature of personal disaster, and the art of dealing with rejection. Articulate, witty, incisive, and inspirational, Voice Lessons is a book for writers and aspiring writers, and for everyone who loves women's writing.
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Carnal
Acts: Essays
Paperback (1996)
In this book of essays, Nancy Mairs beautifully portrays her individual difficulties and triumphs as well as the ultimate resilience of the human spirit. With her characteristic blend of startling honesty, wit, and insight, Mairs explores the challenges of living as fully as possible while gradually becoming more and more physically crippled, in order to make sense of, and celebrate, what it is to be human. Written over several years, many of the essays in Carnal Acts focus on what it means to "cope" with multiple sclerosis, the most conspicuous and consuming aspect of Mairs' life. But she offers more than this piece of her experience, revealing her inner life as a writer, wife, and mother and then looking outward to discuss the nature of female discourse (polite and impolite); civil disobedience; and finally, what it is to live full of gratitude and excitement despite the struggles and hardships that are a part of all day-to-day experience.
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Remembering
the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Time
Paperback (1995)
Nancy Mairs reconstructs her past by exploring her erotic and emotional development in order to lay claim to her life—and women's lives in general. Lyrical, intense, and particular, flouting taboos and self-censorship, this acclaimed memoir explores the spaces that have shaped a life, including the "bone house" of her body.
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Ordinary
Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal
Paperback (1994)
A New York Times Notable Book of 1993
An unconventional spiritual autobiography, told in a remarkable, outspoken voice and rooted in the messy realities and questions-the 'ordinary time'-of one woman's life, from infidelity to living with multiple sclerosis, to death, to renewing a marriage.
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Plaintext:
Essays
Paperback (1992)
What does it mean to be a woman in a patriarchal world—a world where male interests, pursuits, and values create the cultural standards by which human ideas and actions are judged? For Nancy Mairs, this question provides the focus for a riveting collection of essays in which she applies recent feminist concepts to her own life, which has been marked by the effects of multiple sclerosis, depression, and agoraphobia. Walking the line between acceptance and denial of the world, Mairs writes about the joy of romance and the trauma of rape, the despair of institutionalization and the tenderness of motherhood. Ultimately, she shares her love of writing, and does so in prose that demonstrates her already proven talents as a poet.
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In
All the Rooms of the Yellow House: Poems
Paperback (1984)
In her first full-length collection of poems, Nancy Mairs seeks out the essential spaces and confinements of existence, defined against a ground of both desert and New England imagery by her relationships: with mother and dead father; with husband, daughter, lover; with a striped and a black cat. These form the world/text whose significance, through vision and revision, she picks out painfully in verse and prose. Obliquely, in the grammar of dream, she explores and expands the edges of her life until she can move out of the attic—into which have always been locked the inarticulate disruptive forces labeled madwoman—into the place of her own making: all the rooms of the yellow house.