About the Book
Seven Minutes from Home: An American Daughter’s Story is a collection of linked stories written chronologically from 1980—2015. They create a multifaceted narrative of how the public and the private, the past and present, the local and global, intersect. With earnest reflection, modesty and humor, Laurel Richardson introduces the reader to her Ohio neighborhoods, friends, family, writers and therapy dogs. She ages, retires and frets over her droopy eyebrow. Her town’s local stores close; police bust heroin dealers; September 11th happens; universities corporatize; poetry venues transform. All this and much more as Richardson honors the complexity and vibrancy of America, and her life within it. Richardson’s renowned book, Fields of Play (1997) is about constructing a life inside the academy; Seven Minutes from Home is about constructing a life outside the academy. This extraordinary example of literary sociology can be read for pleasure, adopted in book clubs, or used in courses in American Studies, communication, creative writing, narrative, qualitative research, sociology, cultural studies and women’s studies. An appendix offers discussion questions, research projects and creative writing exercises.
NOMINATED: USA BEST BOOK AWARD 2016 in the category of autobiography/memoirs
NOMINATED: ICQI 2017 Outstanding Book Award
About the Author :
Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, has received a Life-Time Achievement Award in Qualitative Research , a Cooley Book Award, and two Affirmative-Action awards. She writes daily. She is most proud of her therapy dogs’ work with special-needs children.
Review :
“A tour de force, the penultimate statement from gifted writer Laurel Richardson. For the last three decades Richardson has defined and then charted the murky waters of critical, literary autoethnographic discourse. Here an American daughter’s story comes home. We all need a starting place, seven minutes from home is a good place to begin.” - Norman Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Laurel’s Seven Minutes from Home takes us into her neighborhood and the mundane and not-so-mundane moments of her everyday life. We accompany her walking her beloved dogs, socializing with neighbors, eating with family, restoring her home, buying ice cream, and participating in local poetry groups. We come to know her and her neighborhood through her blending of ethnographic sensibilities and literary writing, where the past and present connect and the self is contextualized in relationships, neighborhoods, and the larger community. The stories are riveting; you will not be able to stop reading. You will identify with her experiences and they will stay with you, meaning you now will see things in your neighborhood you have not seen before and think of your identity and home in more nuanced ways than you ever thought possible.” - Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida
“Laurel Richardson has already long established herself as a foundational scholar in many fields: sociology, autoethnography, gender studies, qualitative research. Her latest book however—Seven Minutes from Home: An American Daughter’s Story—repositions her as something more—an elder of our scholarly community chronicling the aging but beautiful face of American life, still alive and well in Richardson’s own little Ohio corner of it. This stunning little book sets itself up as a kind of Our Town for the 21st century, detailing as Thornton Wilder did not only the narrator’s life but the lives of her neighbors and family members too. Writing in sparse but evocative prose in the style of May Sarton, Carson McCullers, and Saul Bellow (whose epigraph opens this text), Richardson invites us along her free-wheeling walk down memory lane (and around the streets of her neighborhood) not mapped by linearity or geography, but rather by associative memory, despite its mostly linear table of contents and exhortation to pay attention to location, location, location! The voice that narrates Seven Minutes from Home is still unmistakeably that of a sociologist, calling upon the traditions and forms of sociology throughout, exploring and linking time, place, action and subjectivity. I read it in one sitting on a Sunday afternoon and it made me feel homesick no end, but also deeply grateful. This is the story of a life situated within a pulsing American culture; a true melting pot full of oppression and opportunity, full of tragedy and triumph, as vibrant today as it ever was. Her brother called this book ‘Americana’; I call it a love letter to a culture and a life well-lived.” - Anne Harris, Monash University, Australia
“Laurel Richardson’s evocative autoethnography puts on display how a woman, located in time and place, lives into the pleasures and sorrows that come, the choices and circumstances that shape, the spiritual and secular that intermingle, and the everyday and artistic that define. Reading this book, you'll find yourself engaged with the Richardson’s life story and, simultaneously, you'll discover that you are contemplating your own life history. Arriving at the book’s end, you will know you've spent your time well.” - Ronald J. Pelias, Emeritus Professor, Southern Illinois University
“Laurel Richardson’s new book Seven Minutes from Home: An American Daughter’s Story shows what polished and accomplished contemporary research writing looks like. This book provides even more evidence about how the personal intersects with the sociological. Perhaps I should have waited a little longer to finish working on Permission: The International Interdisciplinary Impact of Laurel Richardson’s Work (Sense, 2016)? Who knows? It is fantastic to see yet another totally new contribution to her already diverse and impressive body of work. Laurel’s book certainly confirms my investigation of her profound impact on the scholarly work of so many others.” - Julie White, The Victoria Institute, Australia
“I started reading this book one evening, and found myself unable to put it down. In Seven Minutes from Home, Laurel Richardson writes about the exquisite joys and pains of daily life. Her heartbreakingly beautiful prose both celebrates and critiques those mundane realities we so often take for granted. Her book is an exemplar for how good social science should be written.” - Jessica Smartt Gullion, Texas Woman’s University
“Oddly gripping. By which I mean, I didn’t expect to be pulled into it with such force from the first page. Laurel Richardson has stepped into the river of her life and has managed to face both directions. While she stands the reader moves all around her: there is both placidity and rapid motion (rivers also have moods) and at times a kind of vertigo in the unexpected experience. Seven minutes from home takes us everywhere and anytime with revealing insight.” - Doug Storm, author of The Gulf of Folly and Producer and Host of the arts & culture radio program, Interchange, in Bloomington, IN
“Here’s a book you will stay up past your bedtime to read. In this story about place, relationships, and the grace of the everyday moments that make up a life and a community, Richardson takes the reader through those small details that are monumental—anti-Semitism, divorce, the trauma of shifting neighborhoods, intersections of class, race, and gender—to how book club, poetry writing, neighborhood talk, making chicken soup, impromptu home haircuts, colonoscopies, and eating ice-cream at Dairy Queen ground us.” - Sandra L. Faulkner, Bowling Green State University
“Why seven minutes from home? Because so much of life is lived within the radius of a seven- minute walk, bike or drive from home—shopping, walking the dog, going to the library, school, church or synagogue. In this vivid memoir, Laurel Richardson combines sociological insights with a feminist focus on lived-experience to bring our attention to the joy, pain and discomforts of everyday life in details large and small. A trip to the local Dairy Queen is an occasion to celebrate the diversity of patrons who share her guilty pleasure which is later tempered by the discovery of a heroin bust in that very same location. Her love of family, friends and community are captured in the routine activities of the annual neighborhood pot-lucks, monthly meals with her extended family and the annual Independence Day parade. She weaves the present with the past, helping herself and the reader cope with the inevitable changes of life like aging, illness and death. We are nourished along the way by her delicious description of her mother’s recipe for chicken soup and by her enduring love of poetry. We learn about Laurel, but we also discover much about ourselves. The fabric of life she stitches together she calls “family, ” and I am glad to be a part of it. Highly recommended for courses in sociology, women’s studies and creative writing.” - Mary Margaret Fonow, Arizona State University
“A writer is always on the lookout for worthy writers to read and learn from. Laurel Richardson is one of those writers --a respected scholar who conveys her thoughts and knowledge with a poet’s voice. There’s much for writers to admire and learn from her work: her lyricism, lexicon, creative structures, wide audience appeal and her ability to examine everyday events in the context of the broader world.” - Susan Knox, essayist, fiction-writer and author of Financial Basics
“Laurel Richardson’s latest book blurs the lines between autoethnography and memoir as she tells her-story of becoming an American woman. In a deeply personal work, interwoven with familial experiences and pertinent historical moments, Richardson constructs a rich, textual photo album of “pictures that … allow traces of the past to poke through” in a book that will take each reader who engages the work much further than Seven Minutes from Home .” - Mary E. Weems, Ph. D., author of Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues
“Laurel Richardson’s sensitive memoir, Seven Minutes From Home, has the capacity to awaken in all of us those connections to the past that inform our present, everyday lives. Her story inspires us to see the nuanced history we bring with us and gives us permission to become empowered by it, as she has.” - Pat Snyder, Personal Coach and Newspaper columnist of Balancing Acts
