Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on. This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don't write that book as a linear progression you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if you're as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello. What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from mood rooms to art installations to off the beaten path natural history museums, to the more scientific corners of topics like depression and synesthesia, to jazz improv and, of course, the countless writers who have attempted to pin down just what this central aspect of being human is and means. The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, smart and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative. "I'm one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood," Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you're one of Mary Cappello's people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.

Foreword Book of the Year Award Independent Publishers Award (IPPY) Lambda Literary Award Finalist Publishing Triangle Award Finalist GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for "Getting the News," The Georgia Review, Summer 2009 Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for "Getting the News" Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists' queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs "see" inside breast cancer's paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate? The first chapter paves the way for the book's central emphases: a meditation on the nature of "news" and the new, on noticing, on messages-including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease-and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues. Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms- infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute-with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.

"Los Angeles Times" Bestseller
"Mary Cappello 's] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . is] revelatory indeed." --MARK DOTY, author of "Dog Years: A Memoir" and "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems"
"A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book." --SARAH WATERS, author of "The Night Watch" and "The Little Stranger"
Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys--from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text--to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.
Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including "Awkward: A Detour," which was a "Los Angeles Times" bestseller, "Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, " which won a "ForeWord Reviews" Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and "Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them." Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.