Beauty in Unexpected Places
Sometimes gifts just fall into your lap. The past few months have been filled with unexpected, lovely surprises. Other than the new man in my life (about whom I will not write here because that's just not what I do), the nicest one has been a side project that came to me somewhat out of the blue with -- I'll admit it -- low expectations on my part. My experiences with self-publishing authors have been much more miss than hit, yet that little voice in my head told me I needed to pursue this one. I'm glad I did.

This past fall I had the pleasure and the privilege of copyediting Ann Pai's My Other Body: A Memoir of Love, Fat, Life, and Death, which tells the story of Ann and her sister, Joyce. It is a simultaneously beautiful and wrenchingly sad memoir of their relationship and their struggles with food and family and love. Ann's complicated love for her sister shines through her lyric and insightful prose:

At twenty-two, Joyce is less my elder than before, our ages immaterial. I’ve slid toward her like a bead on an abacus: one gap closes, and one opens. We’re both in college now, survivors of a shared and finished journey, escaped from anyone’s continual knowledge of our whereabouts. But our distance is immense. We know some of the names but none of the voices of each other’s friends. Neither of us knows where the other goes at night, what movies she has watched, what books she reads. We attend different churches. We sit far apart in chapel. We have each begun to smuggle our old belongings from home, to devoid the bedroom of our individual memories.

Sometimes I see Joyce across the red clay campus. She hugs her books to the peanut shell of her torso and climbs the steps toward the elementary education classrooms. Or she kneels, troweling the hosta beds in her job with the landscape crew. Or alone, she carries her tray across the cafeteria. From her apartment a mile across campus, she sends me greeting cards. “Just saying hello,” they say.

My inscribed copy arrived earlier this week and is as gorgeous in its design and production as in its story. Kudos and congratulations, Ann. Joyce would be proud.

My Other Body is available through Sunspot Press for $15.
- posted by Lori @ 9:35:00 PM | permanent link | |