01/30/2017
Menkedick, a native Midwesterner, spent her 20s traveling around the globe alone, seeking out landscapes and people different from her home. Whether she was picking grapes in France or teaching English on Réunion Island, Menkedick was “using myself like a Monopoly piece, moving around the globe to acquire experience and knowledge.” At 31, she and her husband moved back home to live in a small cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio and have a baby. Menkedick’s intensely intimate collection of essays chronicles her journey from early adulthood, as a young woman who “confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition” into maturity. She beautifully depicts the physiological changes and emotional battles that took place in her mind and body as she and her husband adjusted to their new sedentary life. Menkedick is a superb storyteller and her writing is filled with remarkable scientific and literary references. She explores her reinvigorated relationship with the Midwestern landscape, seeing quiet beauty in an environment she once longed to leave behind. She details the normal day-to-day tensions between her and her husband during the pregnancy. She takes comfort in her close family relationships while contemplating her new identity as a pregnant woman and mother-to-be. This is a moving and deeply personal look at one woman’s transformation. (May)
Fresh, intimate, and radiantly meditative, Homing Instincts is the story of one woman's “coming of age” as a first-time parent on her family's rural Ohio farm.
After teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France, and witnessing a revolution in Mexico, Sarah Menkedick, at thirty-one, embarks on what might become her most challenging adventure yet: she moves into a tiny, nineteenth-century cabin on her family's farm and prepares to become a mother. She never expected to want this kind of settled life, and yet she finds a new peace and inspiration in the surrounding natural world as she and her husband, Jorge, prepare for the exciting unknown.
Menkedick juxtaposes the progress of her pregnancy and the larger questions it inspires with recollections of her family history; being raised by a single and unapologetically hippie father; her paternal grandmother, Millie, whose Midwestern German fortitude informed the character of the next two generations; and her husband Jorge's loving but difficult childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. Altogether, it becomes a luminous portrait of the time just before and after new motherhood.
Fresh, intimate, and radiantly meditative, Homing Instincts is the story of one woman's “coming of age” as a first-time parent on her family's rural Ohio farm.
After teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France, and witnessing a revolution in Mexico, Sarah Menkedick, at thirty-one, embarks on what might become her most challenging adventure yet: she moves into a tiny, nineteenth-century cabin on her family's farm and prepares to become a mother. She never expected to want this kind of settled life, and yet she finds a new peace and inspiration in the surrounding natural world as she and her husband, Jorge, prepare for the exciting unknown.
Menkedick juxtaposes the progress of her pregnancy and the larger questions it inspires with recollections of her family history; being raised by a single and unapologetically hippie father; her paternal grandmother, Millie, whose Midwestern German fortitude informed the character of the next two generations; and her husband Jorge's loving but difficult childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. Altogether, it becomes a luminous portrait of the time just before and after new motherhood.
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940169906257 |
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Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |