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Growing up can mean growing pains and the joys of new independence.
With maturity comes the shift from infinite possibilities to
imminent realities. These thirteen stories describe the slow and
subtle experience of growing up, allowing us to reflect upon the
forces that pushed us toward adulthood and away from the familiar
ground of youth that must be left behind if we are to learn how to
soar on our own.
These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the
holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though
holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories
challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate
how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a
nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and
motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More
generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone
offers a lot to unpack.
The eight stories in The Nature of Longing move beyond conventional
boundaries of race and gender to explore the universal desire to
belong. Avoiding easy answers, Alyce Miller probes the overlapping
worlds of blacks, whites, gays, and straights, all caught in the
ordinary human struggle to connect with parents, spouses, lovers,
friends, and children. In the title story, a gay librarian in
upstate New York is cruelly outed but finds comfort in the letter
of a man he's never met. In "Color Struck," a black mother in East
Oakland struggles with her inability to name, and thus to accept,
her albino daughter. In "Summer in Detroit," a black man, visiting
his ailing white grandmother, is forced to relive a personal
tragedy that occurred during the 1967 riots. The novella that
closes the book, "Dead Women," examines a young American woman's
search in Europe for romance that lasts beyond desire. Miller gives
substance to her characters' poignant longing, which manifests
itself in unexpected ways.
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