Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Memoirs in Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs were included in Creative Nonfiction’s “Favorite Prizewinning Essays” and as Notable Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays. Barrington is also the author of the bestselling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and five collections of poetry. She has taught at universities and workshops across the U.S. and in England and Spain, and was a faculty member of the MFA program of the University of Alaska: Anchorage. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
The fourteen literary memoirs collected in Virginia’s Apple explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone yet they are linked—characters reappear and, taken together, the pieces create a larger narrative.
The content is wide-ranging: the early days of the Second Wave of feminism—the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times; navigating a sometimes precarious existence as an out lesbian long before it was commonplace; leaving England and becoming an American citizen; finding a life partner; and growing old with an inherited disability. The author’s friendship with the distinguished poet Adrienne Rich is the subject of one story. In another, there’s an appearance by the notorious murderer, Lord Lucan, whose wife was a chance acquaintance.
These stories are laced with humor and joy, while pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.
You can read more about Virginia's Apple on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the memoirs.
From Virginia's Apple
Excerpt from “Westering”
I woke up at dawn somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma. The sun, not yet above the horizon, was announcing itself with a wash of gold. My forehead, pressed against the window of the bus, ached. As I opened my eyes, all I could see were the colors of emptiness—the land, infinite and bare, stretching away in shades of ochre; the sky, bigger than I had ever known it, streaked with wispy clouds whose edges gleamed. I straightened up, dread rising in my throat, and looked ahead through the windshield. The highway ran on forever in a straight line. Turning back to my window, I expected to see at least a few farms or fences, a lonely shack or a corral, but was confronted instead with a mirror image of the view on the other side. With mounting horror, I looked back towards New York; perhaps we had passed through some small town that I would now see receding into the distance. But there was nothing.
In my early twenties I’d been either adventurous or foolhardy, depending on how you look at it, when I had driven alone all over Europe, crossed Alpine passes in storms, and found my way at night through Spanish mountains populated by bandits. Here, though, was a landscape far more dangerous. I might step down from the bus and walk away with nothing but my shadow between me and the sadness I’d kept at bay for so long. Like one of those tumbleweeds, sorrow would bounce all the way to the horizon and when it returned it would, for sure, knock me for six. I grabbed the arms of my seat.
Should I take the next Greyhound back to New York or go on to the West Coast? On my tattered map I traced my route: it would be as far to go back as it would be to go on. My finger landed on the red dot that was San Francisco.
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