Love Affair in the Garden of Milton - by Susannah B Mintz (Paperback)

About the Book

"Love Affair in the Garden of Milton interweaves the private story of a marriage coming apart with readings of John Milton's poetry and prose. Connected essays explore the chaos of loss and the discovery of how a writer can inhabit our emotional as well as our intellectual selves. Inflected by the principles of mindfulness, Susannah B. Mintz's work of expressive life writing explores how we reconstruct ourselves and find our way back to meaning in the aftermath of trauma. Her memoir reflects on a series of affairs, beginning with the author's discovery of her husband's infidelity and their immediate separation because of it, events that offer a starting point but ultimately prove less significant than her resulting search for what still matters in a world rocked beyond recognition. Navigating mourning and the reeling, disorienting pain of betrayal, Mintz's essays animate her surprise, as well that of her students, that Milton and his world-bending heresies can be not just critically relevant but emotionally reassuring, especially in the context of grief. Buddhist teachings and meditation practices align with Milton in ways that further help Mintz grapple with the upheaval of heartbreak, explore the meaning of "meaning," and find a way toward equanimity and calm. Formally inventive and engaging complex philosophical ideas, Love Affair in the Garden of Milton raises questions of forgiveness, desire, identity, grief, and the counterintuitive relevance of literary tradition. This lyric memoir offers readers a sense of partnership, with the author and Milton as companionable guides through the wilds of love and loss"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of Memoir Magazine's Book Prize for Identity/Literature/Grief

Love Affair in the Garden of Milton interweaves the private story of a marriage coming apart with readings of John Milton's poetry and prose. Connected essays chart the chaos of loss and the discovery of how a writer can inhabit our emotional as well as our intellectual selves. Inflected by the principles of mindfulness, Susannah B. Mintz's memoir explores how we reconstruct ourselves and find our way back to meaning in the aftermath of trauma.

Formally inventive and engaging dynamic philosophical ideas, Love Affair in the Garden of Milton raises questions of forgiveness, desire, identity, grief, and the counterintuitive relevance of literary tradition. This lyric memoir offers readers a sense of partnership, with the author and Milton as companionable guides through the wilds of love and loss.

Review Quotes

In Love Affair in the Garden of Milton, Mintz seamlessly maps Milton's great epic onto the small, craggy contours of private grief. A marriage dissolving, a pet missing, an atheist longing for meaning: all of these struggles find their unique telling through the studious (but never distant) love Mintz exhibits for the great English poet, who is also the focus of her academic life. Add to that her insights into (and at times frustrations with) practicing Buddhism and mindfulness, and you have one of the more nuanced displays of a complex intelligence, at once playful and joyous to read, but dead serious, too. This book exemplifies the rigor, energy, and ranginess that I have come to crave from the best literary nonfiction.-- "Chad Davidson, author of "Unearth""

In this moving memoir, appeals to the work of John Milton, especially Paradise Lost, become uncanny conduits for managing marital discord. Like an embedded reporter, the bard sings from the front lines of uncoupling and unbelief. Mintz teaches us to read as if our lives were at stake. And they are.-- "Ralph James Savarese, author of "See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor""

About the Author

Susannah B. Mintz is the author or coeditor of several scholarly works about disability culture and representation, life writing, and early modern literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer's Chronicle, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a professor of English at Skidmore College.