Tell It Slant

Emily Sterling is dying of breast cancer. She is remembering, in a narrative that is as much novel as memoir, the three phases of her life: first, her childhood with adoring but eccentric parents, a time when Emily has to come to terms with the fact that she will never be as beautiful as her mother, ending with a trauma on her high school graduation night; second, her life between the ages of 20 to 30, in which she has a long-term love affair with her college teacher and his wife; and third, the rest of her life, in which she is a college teacher and then a first-time novelist at the age of fifty. The story ends in the garden of Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst. Tell It Slant is an intimate account told by a dying woman desperate to keep talking, to stay alive. She is self-conscious about her choice of words, afraid of being a cliché. Emily's life has been shaped by her mother Dawn, a woman who hears music nobody else hears; her best friend Dorothy, who tormented her when they were children; her high school teacher Miss Randall, who refuses to let her wallow in self-pity; Amy, the wife of the man she loves, a crippled woman whom Emily loves as much as she loves her husband; and finally, Dorothy's daughter, Emily's god-daughter, who becomes Emily's only heir.