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”Deborah Tall has written a memoir of stunning grace. A Family of Strangers creates an intimate accounting of memory through lyrical fragments that transcend time and space. In bare-boned, elegant language, she finds what all families long for—acceptance and forgiveness. A beautiful, jewel-like book.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
”A poignant picture of a seemingly all-American childhood and its deeper, darker history. Much more than just another quest for “roots,” this is a poetic, tough-minded, and moving meditation on the costs of denial, the vagaries of memory, and the very meanings of the past.”
—Eva Hoffman
”This haunting narrative represents in style and substance the experiences of so many: here is family, love and memory broken into pieces, the way painters once shattered the world into cubes so as to reassemble it with more truth and depth of vision. ”
—Eavan Boland
”A powerful book. Driven by a daughter's need to know the truth about her family, the author weaves public and private silences into a larger pattern of meaning. Written in concise and beautiful prose, the book tells a riveting and compelling story, one that is especially relevant today. ”
—Susan Griffin
author of A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
In a lyric essay-cum-memoir, her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, post-war American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present.
Deborah Tall is the author of four books of poems, most recently Summons, published by Sarabande Books after Charles Simic chose it for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. She has also published two previous two books of nonfiction, The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, and co-edited the anthology The Poet's Notebook with Stephen Kuusisto and David Weiss. Tall has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edited its literary journal, Seneca Review, since 1982. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband David Weiss and their two daughters.
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