A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.
— Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger
Awkward
A Detour
Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.
Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781934137017
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781934137901
Mary Cappello, author of Awkward: A Detour, discusses her work with Propeller magazine.
Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Salon, Huffington Post, NPR, in guest author blogs for Powell’s Books, and on five separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and the American Academy Berlin Prize. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.
visit author page »Praise for Awkward
Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.
— Mark Doty, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
For any memoirist writing today, but particularly for one whose class, ethnicity, and sexuality may have left her with the feeling that she’s ‘still arriving,’ there’s strong motivation to stick to the interstate, hoping it will lead to a stunning epiphany, a twelve-city book tour, and a fat movie deal. I find something bracingly feminist, daringly queer, and poignantly democratic in Mary Cappello’s choice to take the nearest exit. Her rare articulation of life’s off-kilter moments makes me feel less alone in my own awkward interior.
— Women's Review of Books
At once comforting and startling….Cappello’s adventurous meditation…makes memory seem like something worth re-making, and not the casual currency it has become. It is a remarkable achievement.
— Adam Phillips, author of Going Sane and Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
An original, psychologically and culturally insightful book, a great pleasure to read.
— Josip Novakovich, author of Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust and April Fool’s Day
Daring in both content and form, Awkward is a wonderfully unpredictable riff on the human predicament.
— Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body and The Secret Life of Objects
With Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello becomes to my mind now the Kepler of human flesh and bone and of the soul of the worlds in which they move….Hers is a wonderful, suddenly essential book.
— Donald Revell, author of The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye and Tantivy