Plaintext: Essays

Plaintext has won critical acclaim and a wide audience for author Nancy Mairs’s unapologetic views on agoraphobia, multiple sclerosis, and the challenges of being a woman in a patriarchal world. The provocative collection includes the widely anthologized essays “On Being a Cripple” and “On Not Liking Sex.”

About the Author :
Nancy Mairs was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. She received an AB in English literature from Wheaton College (Massachusetts). From 1966 to 1972 she worked as a technical editor at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT Press, and the Harvard Law School. In 1972 she moved to Tucson, Arizona, and taught high school and college composition courses while studying for an MFA in creative writing (poetry) and a PhD in English literature, which she was awarded in 1984. In the same year, her book of poems In All the Rooms of the Yellow House received first prize for poetry in the Western States Book Awards competition.

Review :
"The difficulties and despairs through which she has passed have left Nancy Mairs with unique and moving stories to convey, as well as with a strong voice to tell them."--New York Times Book Review "Readable and compelling, written with intimacy . . . and a swagger."--San Francisco Chronicle "[Plaintext] will refresh the mind of just about anyone who reads it."--All Things Considered "[Mairs] scrupulously searches her experience for meaning and bravely bodies it forth in prose. . . . She has the poet's easy access to the unconscious, and the poet's gift for the meaningfully concrete. . . . [Plaintext] is astringent, unsentimental, witty, bracing, provocative, often skeptical, often fun."--Washington Post Book World "There are triumphs here--of will, style, candor, thought, and even form."--Los Angeles Times "That [Plaintext] will change you, that it will strengthen you, I am certain. . . . [Mairs's] prose is stylish, filled with good humor or hot anger."--Columbus Dispatch "Mairs writes with a candor and intimacy that few in-person conversations could handle. Printed communication is needed for this kind of traffic. And this traffic should not be missed."--Mobile Press Register "To read Plaintext is like doing some high, hard mountain-climbing with a fearless and experienced guide. Nancy Mairs's unacceptant, insistent re-examination and reevaluation of self, language, and ideas--a central strategy of feminist thought--brings the reader through a series of risks worth taking."--Ursula K. LeGuin "Nancy Mairs's work is original, nervy, and memorable. She writes like a poet, and like a survivor."--Hilma Wolitzer "These essays are not only honest, searingly so, they are witty, immensely readable, and they pay no homage to that imprisoner of female lives, the appropriate."--Carolyn G. Heilbrun "If you delight in language, originality, surprise, honesty, and grit, read this book. You'll come away with whole sheaves of assumptions scattered."--Robert Houston "Like reading a fascinating private journal."--Kirkus Reviews "These essays tell of the plain moments in an individual woman's life, but they possess a resonance that will strike a universal chord in the minds of all readers."--Booklist "These essays are brilliant. No feminist, male or female, can afford to miss them."--Carolyn Kizer "The prose is cool and the wit as dry as sundown in Mairs's Arizona desert, the jokes as witty as the bright pink flowers on my spiny cactus."--Women's Review of Books