Remembering The Bone House Paperback – June 30, 1995

I feel this was probably her best book in spite of the detailed description of sex which I feel should have been left out and never missed. I had a problem with disposing of this book ...could not give to my church thrift shop so ended up in the rubbish. I am also a congregationalist, the chuch composed of mostly elderly women like myself. I am a former librarian and books that contained explicit sex were usually brought back to us with a note to that effect. Im no prude but we get enough of that on TV and in Movies, do we really need it in a book?

I read most of this book in one morning, over coffee-flavored milk and French toast made with wheat bread (it turned out OK). In the new preface in this edition, Nancy Mairs confesses that it's both "the dearest of her books," and also the "gawkiest." Dear but gawky is a good description. I wasn't blown away by the writing, but what I read lingered with me well past the afternoon. The subtitle, "an erotics of place and space," is the book's theme (to use an old-fashioned word). How your physicality (where you live, who you're surrounded by, the erotic charge or condition of your body) affects you psychologically, intellectually, how you, as a woman, can reclaim some of that stuff, is well-modulated. It's the pacing that seems slightly off. It's painful to wade through childhood and early marriage and nervous breakdown (you knew there was going to be one) before we get Nancy Mairs, the writer, in the memoir. Maybe that's unfair to say, since that's how it all unraveled in life, and there are little hints of possibility. But, I dawdled through most of the beginning, and, you get the feeling that this is the stuff that had to be written to make way for other writing. And the whole "erotics of place and space" thing comes across as a little old-fashioned, pre-certain-kinds-of-literary-theory, but that may not matter to you. There are extremely good bits. The chapter, "Inside and Outside," about the nexus of Mairs's rediscovery of herself as a writer with an erotic reawakening is great. This book is very honest and brave, especially about sexual stuff. Her description of those summers on "The Farm," and its lilies and barn cats, and that perfect version of a writer's group that meets on Mondays and swims afterward and has zucchini quiches is an unsulliable interlude, despite the violence that also happens there. You can't help but like reading the writing-of-oneself-into-being. People who like memoirs will undoubtedly be drawn to this book, and gain something from reading it. I give it a friendly, rather than a disparaging, three stars -- I almost would prefer not to quantify it. While it's neither a masterpiece, nor, I suspect, Mairs's best work (I'm ready to read something with keener focus), it's OK, gawky and dear. A little like most of our lives, our own writing.

I believe this book may be a bit miss-classified. Every comment I have read about it makes a reference to "Women's Studies" or feminism. Naaah! She is way too open, too free of the urges to posture and self-censor for that!In this memoir, Nancy Mairs tells her own story straight up, leaving the gender stereotypes behind. It all reads refreshingly true, with a Yankee voice so clean it begs to be read aloud.

As I said brought back so many of my childhood memories. Of a Time of horses, sheep and cows, playing in the hay barns and banging the oil drum to meet my friends. :>)