For years now, Nancy Mairs has been confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. Through sharing the details of daily physical care and the emotional economy of caregiving, Mairs brings a waist-high perspective to travel, sex and ethics for the disabled.

Acclaimed personal writing from one of our most out-spoken essayists, on disability, on family, on being an impolite woman, and on the opporunities and "gifts" of a difficult life.

Voice Lessons is a book about writing from a woman with a remarkable story to tell and an utterly distinctive voice in which to tell it. Nancy Mairs's essays have been called "triumphs... of will, style, candor, thought and even form" (Los Angeles Times). She has won acclaim for her autobiographical writing on themes from living with depression to renewing a marriage, from sex to religion. In Voice Lessons, Mairs's subjects are literary, but as always her approach is personal, revealing, and inspiring. Mairs first shares her sharply drawn story on how "finding a voice" as an essayist transformed her life when she was a graduate student, wife, and mother in her late thirties. In a tribute to the liberating power of literature and feminist ideas, she shows how the words of other writers made possible a new career, a new life in difficult times. Voice Lessons goes on to explore other women's writing and to outline a singular kind of literary life. Always grounding her writing in personal experience, always making ideas concrete, Mairs gives us essays on writing and the body, the challenges of autobiography, the revelatory power of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, the literature of personal disaster, and the art of dealing with rejection. Articulate, witty, incisive, and inspirational, Voice Lessons is a book for writers and aspiring writers, and for everyone who loves women's writing.

Nancy Mairs reconstructs her past by exploring her erotic and emotional development in order to lay claim to her life--and women's lives in general. Lyrical, intense, and particular, flouting taboos and self-censorship, this acclaimed memoir explores the spaces that have shaped a life, including the "bone house" of her body.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1993
An unconventional spiritual autobiography, told in a remarkable, outspoken voice and rooted in the messy realities and questions--the 'ordinary time'--of one woman's life, from infidelity to living with multiple sclerosis, to death, to renewing a marriage.

"The difficulties and despairs through which she has passed have left Nancy Mairs with unique and moving stories to convey, as well as with a strong voice to tell them." --New York Times Book Review
"These striking essays by Nancy Mairs are so touching and heartbreakingly honest that one often has to put the book down and rest emotionally before reading on. . . . Readable and compelling, written with intimacy . . . and a swagger." --San Francisco Chronicle
"The lugubriousness and self-pity which one might expect to surround these subjects is absent. The prose is cool and the wit as dry as sundown in Mairs' Arizona desert, the jokes as witty as the bright pink flowers on my spiny cactus." --Women's Review of Books