Torch

by Strayed, Cheryl

• ISBN13: 9780618472178
• ISBN10: 0618472177
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-02-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

"Be incredible!" That's the advice Teresa Rae Wood gives the listeners of her popular local radio show, Modern Pioneers!, a kind of hippie Praire Home Companion. Teresa has taken the advice to heart in her own life. As a teen mother and abused wife, she escaped with her two children to rural Minnesota, fell in love with a local carpenter, and raised good kids, Claire and Joshua. Then, at only 38, she receives the devastating news that she is gravely ill. In just a few weeks, she is gone. The award-winning writer Cheryl Strayed creates from this shattering experience a novel that reviewers have called "an unforgettable read" and "a hauntingly beautiful story" that "shimmers with a humane grace." * Infused with compassion and surprising humor, Torch takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of a family reeling from crisis. Claire drops out of college to devote herself to keeping her mother's memory alive back home. Joshua drifts out of high school and into trouble, keeping his grief silently private. Suddenly thrown into adulthood, they struggle to figure out how to connect in this new, unthinkable situation. Their one remaining ballast is Teresa's gentle common-law husband, Bruce. When Bruce announces news of his own plans, it comes as a shock not only to Claire and Joshua but also to the townspeople who have watched this unusual family grow and have come to love them. Cheryl Strayed has a deep appreciation for the shifting rhythms between siblings and parents and for the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living. The wonderful characters in Torch come alive and stay with you long after the novel ends. *Library Journal; Kirkus Reviews; Publishers Weekly Cheryl Strayed's award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, Allure, Self, The Sun, and Nerve. Widely anthologized, her work is featured in The Best New American Voices 2003 and has been selected twice for The Best American Essays. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed has worked as a political organizer for women"s advocacy groups and was an outreach worker at a sexual violence center in Minneapolis. She holds an M.F.A. from the Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing Program. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children. Praise for Torch "Torch is a deeply compelling, wonderfully crafted story about a journey into, through, and past grief . . . I loved the honesty of this novel, the way it looked at every aspect of loss and recovery -- the pain, the joy, the absurdity, the anger, the despair, the hope, and the great beauty -- without ever holding back." -- Elizabeth Berg "In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments." -- Ursula Hegi "Like Jane Smiley, Strayed effectively taps into the psyche of midwestern America, and her evocative prose leaves an indelible mark." -- Kirkus Reviews "We know these characters so well and with such intricate understanding that their lives belong to us in a way that is the rare gift of fiction and a particular triumph of Strayed's wise and beautiful novel." -- Susan Richards Shreve "Strayed writes fierce truths about how we live, [with] compassion, humor, and uncanny precision. We need her." -- Sandra Scofield "Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise, possessed of a genuine love for her characters, Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence. This book is a wonderful and heartening accomplishment." -- George Saunders

Excerpts

1 She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor -the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the glass-while he sat on his little stool with wheels and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after shed stopped speaking, his head cocked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and he was the final doctor, the real doctor, the one who would tell her at last what was wrong. Teresa held her earrings in the palm of one hand-dried violets pressed between tiny panes of glass-and put them on, still getting dressed after hours of going from one room to the next in a hospital gown. She examined her shirt for lint and cat hair, errant pieces of thread, and primly picked them off. She looked at Bruce, who looked out the window at a ship in the harbor, which cut elegantly, tranquilly along the surface of the lake, as if it werent January, as if it werent Minnesota, as if it werent ice. At the moment she wasnt in pain and she told the doctor this while he wrote. "There are long stretches of time that I feel perfectly fine," she said, and laughed the way she did with strangers. She confessed that she wouldnt be surprised if she were going mad or perhaps this was the beginning of menopause or maybe she had walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia had been her latest theory, the one she liked best. The one that explained the cough, the ache. The one that could have made her spine into a zipper. "Id like to have one more glance," the doctor said, looking up at her as if he had risen from a trance. He was young. Younger. Was he thirty? she wondered. He instructed her to take her clothes off again and gave her a fresh gown to wear and then left the room. She undressed slowly, tentatively at first, and then quickly, crouching, as if Bruce had never seen her naked. The sun shone into the room and made everything lilac. "The light-its so pretty," she said, and stepped up to sit on the examining table. A rosy slice of her abdomen peeped out from a gap in the gown, and she mended it shut with her hands. She was thirsty but not allowed a drop of water. Hungry, from having not eaten since the night before. "Im starving." "Thats good," said Bruce. "Appetite means that youre healthy." His face was red and dry and cracked-looking, as if hed just come in from plowing the driveway, though hed been with her all day, going from one section of the hospital to the next, reading what he could find in the waiting rooms. Reading Readers Digest and Newsweek and Self against his will but reading hungrily, avidly, from cover to cover. Throughout the day, in the small spa

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Excerpted from Torch by Cheryl Strayed
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