Braided Lives

(Paperback)

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Description

Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the 1950s - that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the 60s ticked away underground. Spanning 20 years, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age. It features Jill (the fiercely independent poet) and her cousin and closest friend Donna (beautiful and alluring) as they reach the understanding that to control their lives they must fight. Braided Lives is an enduring portrait of the past and its impact on the tenuous present.

Reviews

"This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy's native talent for story-telling...we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life's redeeming pleasures--sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden."
--Judith Paterson, Washington Post Book World

"A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading Braided Lives, crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Braided Lives is a big, rich book. This writer just gets better and better. She is allowing more flashes of humor and more generosity...her sure novelist's hold on making a good story, her poet's eye for careful detail... Braided Lives is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant."
--Marcie Hershman, Boston Globe

"Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience."
--Marilyn French

Author Bio

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, including Dance the Eagle to Sleep, Gone to Soldiers, Vida, and Woman on the Edge of Time; numerous volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir, Sleeping with Cats. She is the recipient of four honorary doctorates and has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time. She lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.