Reading My Mother Back by Timothy C Baker

Reading My Mother Back by Timothy C Baker

An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to illustrate the importance of storytelling.

When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma, illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it's about loneliness and the search for belonging; it's about how ordinary lives are transfigured by storytelling.

Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to love, Baker shows how literature provides a framework for understanding our experiences, and offers a way of connecting with everything we have lost. The book illustrates how children's animal stories brings us into a love of the world, and how acts of rereading become a way not of assuaging grief, but of bringing the past and present together. Reading My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we read and share matter so much. And there are bunnies.

Timothy C. Baker is Senior Lecturer in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009) and Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014).

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9781913380472
ISBN 10	1913380475
Titel	Reading My Mother Back
Autor	Timothy C Baker
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Goldsmiths, Unversity of London
Erscheinungsjahr	2022-09-13
Seitenanzahl	168
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.