Apron Apocalypse

Best-selling novelist and poet Jeanette Lynes lights up these lyric essays with her inimitable wit and verve, making inspired and surprising sense of her past, her obsessions, and her restless wanderings in search of home.

In these deeply entertaining essays, Jeanette Lynes throws out sentences like glittering lifelines to her past self. She brings her rural childhood to life again, drawing insights painful and uplifting from the mire of poverty and seclusion. She charts the challenging internal weather of her post-divorce campus life as a creative writing prof. And in a pivotal essay on aprons, Lynes brilliantly stitches together the loneliness and depression of rural farmwives with the hopeful mothers -- like hers -- fighting heroically to raise their kids on next to nothing on a hard-scrabble farm.

Lynes' essays track her path from a comfortable married life to a new, more precarious identity with the solitude required to create art. She shows us her fierce struggle for a room of her own, even when that room is an apartment invaded each night by a species of bat that she dubs a "a little bag of night." Whether ruminating upon Mary Pratt's flaming dishcloths or the spinning carnival ride in a Sarah Polley film, Lynes' lyrical gaze interrogates her assumptions, her desires, and her perpetual quest for home.

While regret and self-incriminating remorse sometimes infuse her words, Jeanette Lynes is more than able to laugh at herself -- and the comic relief of short riffs like "My Life as a Pinterest Board" and "When I am Funniest (An Essay in Lists)" act as counterpoint to the longer and more meditative pieces.