"With candor, bracing wit, and the kind of skewering insight that could kill if she let it, Joan Connor investigates love, sex, motherhood, family, and the ways they echo back through memory, sometimes to comfort and sometimes to bite. I am so engaged by her vital, verbally adventurous voice that I would follow her pretty much anywhere she wants to go."—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart
“Early on, Joan Connor writes that ‘Wordplay and wit are my versions of despair.’ The passage is born of spending a night in James Thurber’s house, when the author feels kinship with Thurber as eccentric. It is her eccentricity, her off-centeredness, that keeps these writings so lively: Connor views love and death and work and art from so brilliantly quirky an angle that her wit (in all that noun’s meanings) and the wordplay ultimately preclude mere despair in reader and writer alike. I can’t overpraise Connor’s accomplishment.”—Sydney Lea, author of Hunting the Whole Way Home
"Joan Connor's essays are a survivor's psalms, a secular spirit's prayers played brilliantly in ragtime. She sees herself and all the rest of us—our yearnings, our secrets, our foibles—with such clarity her vision would be terrifying if it were not at once so kind, if her words were not so salty and sharp, her sentences so energetic and exhilarating."—Richard Hoffman author of Half the House: a Memoir
