I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place: A Memoir

"Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both." --Helen Oyeyemi, NPR This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award-nominated author of The Bird Artist begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy's summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. Howard Norman's life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales--including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is "I hate to leave this beautiful place"--and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this "unexpectedly arresting" memoir, life's unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (The New York Times Book Review). "Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice. . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever." --The Washington Post "These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he's lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian." --The New Yorker

About the Author :
Howard Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a winner of the Lannan Literary Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were both nominated for National Book Awards. Norman is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L., What Is Left the Daughter, and Next Life Might Be Kinder. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, DC.

Review :
"Norman's tale is conversational, elegant, and full of life...All Norman's stories - even the last, of a tragedy visited on him and his family, another intimation of death-are related with grace. He shows that the pleasures of the memoir often lie not in a life of dramatic incident but in the flights and transfigurations of a contemplative mind." - Jane Smiley, "Harper's" "Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both, and offers fine, subtly fey companionship to boot." - Helen Oyeyemi, "NPR.org" "Five stellar personal essays by Norman that shed light on his melancholy, tragedy-struck fiction and larger human failures....A bracing, no-nonsense memoir, infused with fresh takes on love, death and human nature." - STARRED "Kirkus "