Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays

by Bonnie Friedman

Overview

Surrendering Oz is a memoir in essays that charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl. From her early job as a proofreader at The Guinness Book of World Records through a series of dominating and liberating friendships and secret connections, the author takes charge of her life as a Texas professor, writer, and wise student of her own soul.

Reader’s Digest says reading Surrendering Oz “is like having a conversation with a bracingly honest but fundamentally kind friend. In 15 pitch-perfect essays, she chronicles her hard-earned rejection of the cultural fairytales of womanhood as she comes fully into possession of her life.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989753227
Publisher:	Etruscan Press
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Pages:	241
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the widely anthologized Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. She is also the author of The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy. Her work has appeared in The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Buddhist Writing, The Best Writing on Writing, the Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best of O., the Oprah Magazine. She teaches creative writing at the Universityof North Texas, and divides her time between Brooklyn, New York, and Denton, Texas.

Table of Contents

Contents
Prologue…………………………………………………………..
Coming of Age in Book Country…………………………………
How I Learned to Think…………………………………………..
Surrendering Oz…………………………………………………..
Sabotage…………………………………………………………...
My Gertrude Stein…………………………………………………
Beauty from the Underworld………………………………………
Becoming Visible………………………………………………….
In a Room Beside the Sea…………………………………………
Beyond Comparison……………………………………………….
The Watcher……………………………………………………….
The Vagabond Queen of Craig’s List……………………………...
The Masquerade Guest…………………………………………….
The Button King: The Discipline of the Notebook………………..
A Summons to Riverdale ………………………………………….
Afterword: Message from the Shades……………………………...

Editorial Reviews

01/01/2015
Literary revelations concerning gender are a useful takeaway from Friedman's (creative writing, Univ. of North Texas; Writing Past Dark; The Thief of Happiness) autobiographical essays. Women's adventure stories, she explains, often involve a period of coma, à la Sleeping Beauty, and girls' coming-of-age tales involve relinquishing the world beyond home. Friedman's life, however, as described in these insightful examinations of growing up in the Bronx, (kind of) leaving New York for work, and going through the death of her sister and the decline of her parents, has involved anything but absence and relinquishment. The author is at times painfully present in her own life—though she notes that often she doesn't realize the meaning of her piercing observations for decades—and her fumbling efforts to become a "grown-up grown-up" will be so familiar to readers that her musings appear almost as an instruction manual for midlife. VERDICT Readers who feel they are mentally, as Friedman says, "sitting up there cross-legged and gazing out the eyeholes," will recognize themselves in and enjoy this more serious version of Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant. Also a must for students of creative writing.—Henrietta Verma, Library Journal

Library Journal