‘Count your blessings, ‘ his mother told him, ‘Think of everything good in your life.’
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin’s endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor’s office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children’s book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah’s selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband’s opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin’s previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself.
A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.
Table of Content
The Hard Road
If ‘If’s’ and ‘But’s’ Were Candies and Nuts
The Healing Line
Bachelors
Gone the Hard Road
Spook
Noble
A Month of Sundays
Imposters
Bastards
Once upon a Time
My Lost Year
Mischief Afoot
Go
About the author
Lee Martin is the author of many novels, including The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also author of Yours, Jean; The Mutual UFO Network; and Late One Night, among others. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Creative Nonfiction, and The Best American Essays. Winner of the Mary Mc Carthy Prize in Short Fiction, the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, Martin teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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