You're Not Edith: Autobiographical Essays

by Allison Gruber

Overview

A brazenly funny, poignant memoir. 

This gutsy collection offers a brilliant reflection on life as a young lesbian and breast cancer survivor. Through discussions of madness, religion, gender and feminism, Allison Gruber captivates with heartbreaking candor and wit. From her teenage Dian Fossey to her Virginia Woolf of Drama Club, the author invites us into a world of brash, bookish hilarity, as she navigates an unusual life, interrupted. In You’re Not Edith, Gruber asks herself how best to live and finds answers big enough for all of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807600054
Publisher:	Braziller, George Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2015
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Allison Gruber’s prose has appeared in a number of literary journals, and in the anthology Windy City Queer: Dispatches from the Third Coast. She has been a poet-in-residence with The Poetry Center of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently resides with her wife, Sarah, in Flagstaff, AZ.

Table of Contents

The Mountain 1

Music in the Head 14

President of Drama Club 25

Iowa 37

Wedding Town 47

A Lady Professor 58

Student Fiction 75

Bernie 89

Jesus Never Made Me a Mix-Tape 102

Speaking to Strangers 114

Author Biography 135

Acknowledgments 134

Editorial Reviews

12/08/2014
In this slim collection of personal essays, Gruber shares such an intimate look at her personal struggles—from coming out as queer in her teens to being diagnosed with cancer as a young woman—that, if not for her insistent humor, it might be difficult to navigate this memorable book’s pages. Looking back to her childhood in the Chicago suburbs, in a home characterized by her parents’ bickering, Gruber recalls trips to her cousins’ house: “Iowa always felt like an escape—a place where it was perfectly acceptable to wear blue jeans to church, swear in front of the children.” Some of the best selections center around Gruber’s diagnosis of breast cancer at age 34, as she experiences harrowing treatments and contrasts her status as a “youngish, single, gender-ambivalent lesbian” with a disease that’s been hyper-feminized in American culture. In “Bernie,” the strongest piece, Gruber expresses a profound sense of hope by adopting a dachshund, having learned from her surgeon she has a good chance of outliving a new pet. Her courage as she accepts her post-surgery appearance (“This is you now”) is remarkable and inspiring. These stories are especially moving for their simplicity and for Gruber’s honest, straightforward manner of storytelling. The result is a slim but powerful book. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"The attention to these small moments, small eccentricities and oddities, makes the whole book a delight, with new surprises and insights from page to page….Through Allison Gruber’s ten delightful essays, we get to know her and a wide cast of friends and family well because she takes the time to give us her thoughts, her stories, her private moments, making it a book well worth the read.

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New Pages

"In-your-face funny and heartbreakingly sad….Gruber's essays add up to a kaleidoscopically engaging read."

Booklist