About this item
Highlights
- Guess What's Different is a collection of essays about the moments no one wants to talk about.
- Author(s): Susan Triemert
- 154 Pages
- Literary Collections, General
Description
About the Book
Guess What's Different is a book about grief and loss, but primarily it's about love.
Book Synopsis
Guess What's Different is a collection of essays about the moments no one wants to talk about. Family history, family secrets. Anxiety, depression, and grief. With sharp prose and an open heart, Susan Triemert brings these moments back to life and makes you care about people you don't know. Even when it hurts, she writes about her life and family with honesty and tenderness, from the pain and confusion of losing her parents, to the joy of finding her children through adoption. To Triemert, every moment matters. Memories fade and shape our narratives, and photographs should be scrutinized for any missing truths. It's the writing that gets you though. Whether they're sad or scary or sweet, Triemert's style and precision turn these essays into stories that you really don't want to end.
Review Quotes
"With honesty that stuns and a mastery of emotional description, Guess What's Different is true and unequivocal soul work. Susan Triemert bravely charts pain and loss, hope and new motherhood, grief and the polaroid fade of memory, all with an abiding love and an insistence that the stories we tell mean something, that all those tiny moments matter. These essays, each of them masterstrokes, become vital snapshots in an even more brilliant whole. Triemert is an essayist of staggering skill, and Guess now ranks among my favorite books. This is what it looks like when an artist stands at the height of their powers."
-Nick Olson, author of Here's Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow.
"'One cannot protect a cloud from the sharp winds-nor can a prayer make someone love you, ' writes Susan Triemert in her debut essay collection, Guess What's Different, which does the astonishing work of reminding us that the desire to be loved is love itself and that such love guarantees one will never be 'orphaned' in the world, not by grief nor silence nor the failure of memory. With language tender in its detail and heartbreakingly sad, Triemert reflects on the loss of her parents and the adoption of her sons, building for herself 'a place where every being who lives here has been chosen, a place where everyone belongs.' Guess What's Different is one such place for the reader as well-a home that puts striking, moving language to those feelings of anxiety, desertion, and all things love.
-Susan L. Leary, author of Contraband Paradise