The Awful Truth by Diana Hamilton
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In this book, Diana Hamilton extends her previous explorations of ethics and techniques of self-control (OKAY, OKAY and Some Shit Advice) onto the fraught terrain of authorship and selfhood: in two long pieces, THE AWFUL TRUTH draws with wry seriousness on psychoanalytic theory, film criticism, memoir, and self-help literature to interrogate contemporary bromides drawn from philosophy, online forums, CBT, and Women's Health alike. Part homage to influences like Bernadette Mayer, part restless meditation on love and identity, Write in Your Sleep is a verse 'annotated bibliography' in which the narrator ardently catalogs her dreams in an attempt to discover a link between life and art that dodges both. In the second piece, a novella titled Fear and Trembling, a woman who styles herself a therapeutic innovator forces her friends to re-enact Hollywood classics, only to be rebuffed by one friend's adaptation of Kierkegaard as paranoiac sci-fi erotica centered around a Bartleby-esque refusal to perform free emotional labor. With a keen sense of both the consolations and the limits of the various genres that animate her work, Hamilton surveys the semiotic scramble of 21st-century subjectivity--obsessions with health and productivity, privacy and commodification--and lays bare the masochism implicit in moralistic imperatives to improve ourselves and to capitalize (literally) on our repressions. We need, they say, 'a machine for fighting anxiety' that would allow us to act out of desire rather than fear. Hamilton's book is a utopia of sharing and listening that exceeds social norms--that reorients our fears about the world into desire for our friends and for our lovers and for a better world for us all.--Marie BuckDiana Hamilton's initial short stories were created for her children's amusement. Despite the fact that they were never published, the writing bug had struck. Over the next 10 years, she juggled writing novels with raising her children, gardening, and cooking in a nearby inn's restaurant - a great way to escape cleaning! Diana and her husband live in Shropshire, UK.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780999431313 |
| ISBN 10 | 0999431315 |
| Title | The Awful Truth |
| Author | Diana Hamilton |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Golias Books |
| Year published | 2017-11-15 |
| Number of pages | 152 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |