Eula Biss has an MFA from the University of Iowa, teaches non-fiction writing at Northwestern University, and is co-editor of Essay Press. Some of these essays have appeared in magazines. She won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for this essay collection.

In Nov ’09 my wife’s Book Club discussed this book and she highly recommended it to me. The 13 essays are divided into 5 groups. With the number of essays in a group given in parentheses, the groups are: Before (1), New York (4), California (3), The Midwest (4), and After (1). I enjoyed all 13 essays, but I would have enjoyed them more had I know beforehand that the books 23 pages of Notes are more like prefaces or reasons for each essay than like the usual source notes. For anyone reading this book, I highly recommend reading her Note for each essay before reading that actual essay, for the Note can add a deeper dimension to her experience (or discovery) that led her to write that essay.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is judged by Robert Polito, whom I will quote at length in this paragraph because I liked very much his descriptions of Eula Biss’s writing. “Biss’s occasions, whether race, identity, geography, space, heredity, or fate, are intractable, even impossible, yet her intricate command and the elegance of her mind in motion originates in doubt, distrust, and self-skepticism. Her voice embraces a devastating mix of insistence and quandary, as though she is despairing and pressing on simultaneously.” …”At the start of “Goodbye to All That,” an account of moving to New York, and her honest argument about the city with Joan Didion, Biss slyly glances at the sort of fluent work she resisted writing – ‘I learned to make my experience of being young and new to the city sound effortless and zany. It was not.’ For Notes from No Man’s Land she focuses instead on obstinate contrasts and parallels – those black and white ‘twins,’ and various American dolls, including Barbie, Colored Francie, and her own childhood ‘Black Doll’; her Bronx and Harlem students and the freed slaves during Reconstruction; Babylon and California; looting in New Orleans and Iowa City; her Rogers Park neighborhood and Laura Ingall’s Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. Operating along the edges of autobiography and history, her ‘American Essays’ are conspicuous for the sweep of American life they insinuate, from ‘the War on Telephone Poles,’ Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s doll studies, and Don Henley in Buxton, Iowa, the word ‘nice,’ and NAFTA. Biss recurrently notes her situation at the periphery of the experiences she scrutinizes – the New York she loved ‘was the city that existed on the margins of the story,’ or ‘I covered a San Diego that did not appear in the travel brochures.’ Yet her writing from the margins avoids self-congratulation, once more shunning any modish urban strut for personal skepticism. ‘To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago,’ she writes, ‘is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy’.”

I feel that I have chosen enough in the above quotes to intrigue one to want to read the essays in this unusually perceptive and intriguing book. I believe that most curious readers will find in her ideas some things that will resonate very strongly with the reader – some positively and some negatively – but none that will make you want to put this book aside. And I hope to see more essays by Eula Biss.