Shadow Work - by Emily Hodgson Anderson

About the Book

Blending personal narrative with literary criticism, Emily Hodgson Anderson considers what a life spent with books has taught her about loneliness and human connection.

Book Synopsis

How is it that reading and writing can at once isolate us and bring us closer to others? Blending personal narrative with literary criticism, Emily Hodgson Anderson considers what a life spent with books has taught her about loneliness and human connection. She delves into the unseen labor of women, authors, and mothers, and she argues that we can reimagine intimacy through books. Herself a book lover and writer, a teacher of literature, and a single mom, Anderson reflects on the loneliness--and the strength--that can come from living, writing, and parenting alone.

Shadow Work puts writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Laurence Sterne, and Shakespeare into unexpected conversations with authors of children's literature and contemporary fiction, among them Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zadie Smith, and Lewis Carroll. Elegantly and poignantly written, this book examines what it means to revisit longtime literary companions and how literature can help us better understand what we show and hide about ourselves.

Review Quotes

A graceful literary memoir.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Shadow Work makes legible the invisible labor--and love--of reading, writing, and parenting. Anderson beautifully captures the companionship and solace provided by books. Her own book does the same, offering insight, connection, and deeply felt humanity.--Julia Lee, author of Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America

How does reading about others become a bridge we use to cross back and forth between a lost dead self and the shaky promise of a new? In Shadow Work, Anderson sits down with her favorite authors--Zadie Smith, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Percival Everett--to discuss how they provide an invisible structure that supports creative work. Through a rigorous excavation of the power of the book, Anderson brings herself--and her readers--back to life.--Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award-winning author of Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems

In these remarkable essays, Anderson's bright curiosity lures readers toward philosophers' metaphors, through horses' stables, and into children's backpacks; she draws insights equally from the threads of plots and the sinews of joints. Shadow Work may begin with loneliness, but it offers up the best kind of company: visceral and cerebral, unrepentantly bookish, and, most importantly, honest and warm.--Sarah Mesle, senior editor at large, Los Angeles Review of Books

Emily Hodgson Anderson is a mother of young sons, an eighteenth-century British literature scholar, a long-distance runner, an accomplished equestrian, and a reader of raunchy British romance novels. She believes in the ability of the human mind--and its great metaphor, language--to lend "access to that illusory and intoxicating kind of 'knowing' not otherwise possible in real life." Each brilliant essay contained herein celebrates the shadowy geographies of reading where we grope about and find one another, though find one another we do indeed. Machines, as powerful as they may be, can't tease out a human soul. Shadow Work shows us how, on this "darkling plain," to seek any other human creature's heart and mind.--Michelle Latiolais, author of A Proper Knowledge

About the Author

Emily Hodgson Anderson is professor of English and Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two books of literary criticism, and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Air/Light, and LitHub. She lives in Los Angeles with her two young boys and one old dog.