Louise Desalvo's Books

On Moving

A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

By: Louise DeSalvo

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On Moving

A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

By: Louise DeSalvo

When acclaimed memoirist and scholar Louise DeSalvo sold the house she and her husband had raised their children in and moved to a beautiful new home in Montclair, New Jersey, she was shocked to discover a rash of unexpected emotions interfering with her plans. Suddenly the old, cramped house was paradise, and the new house a barren building with none of the comforts or familiarity of "home." Faced with a sudden disillusionment over her dream house, DeSalvo turned, as she always has, to her favorite writers. What she found was a treasure-trove of material, most of which has seldom been written about before, chronicling the tumultuous and inspiring moves of some of our most beloved literary figures. Percy Shelley, destitute and restless, moved his tired family from one home to another, only to settle in what he came to believe was a haunted house on the Gulf of Spezia, in which he soon drowned. Virginia Woolf, on her hunt for the perfect room of her own, was a real estate hound, and spent years trying to get back to her home in London after a nervous breakdown forced her to relocate to the country. More recently, Mark Doty found selling the house he and his dying lover spent decades renovating surprisingly freeing as the couple found a new home in which to say goodbye. DeSalvo mines the hopes, disappointments, memories, and fears that come with that simple yet fundamental part of everyone's lives ... moving.

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Page Count

238

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1608191184

ISBN 13

9781608191185

Writing as a Way of Healing

How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives

By: Louise Desalvo

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Writing as a Way of Healing

How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives

By: Louise Desalvo

In this inspiring book, based on her twenty years of research, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. DeSalvo shows how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won't help you; in fact, there's abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging. DeSalvo's program is based on the best available and most recent scientific studies about the efficacy of using writing as a restorative tool. With insight and wit, she illuminates how writers, from Virginia Woolf to Henry Miller to Audre Lorde to Isabel Allende, have been transformed by the writing process. Writing as a Way of Healing includes valuable advice and practical techniques to guide and inspire both experienced and beginning writers.

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242

Publisher

Beacon Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807072435

ISBN 13

9780807072431

Crazy in the Kitchen

Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Crazy in the Kitchen

Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

By: Louise DeSalvo

During Louise DeSalvo's childhood in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. Louise's step-grandmother insists on recreating the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, clashing with Louise's convenience-food-loving mother; Louise, meanwhile, dreams of cooking perfect fresh pasta in her own kitchen. But as Louise grows up to indulge in amazing food and travels to Italy herself, she arrives at a fuller and more compassionate picture of her own roots. And, in the process, she reveals that our image of the bounteous Italian American kitchen may exist in part to mask a sometimes painful history. Louise DeSalvo is a writer, professor, lecturer, and scholar who lives in New Jersey. Her many books include the memoirs Vertigo, Breathless, and Adultery; the acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work; and Writing as a Way of Healing. Recently, she edited Woolf's early novel Melymbrosia and coedited The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. A Book Sense 76 pick in hardcover "Louise DeSalvo packs about six courses of emotional wallop into her slim memoir...[A] tough, courageous story, one of hard-won wisdom and memory."-San Francisco Chronicle "Illuminate[s] the difficulties of reconciling past and present...DeSalvo celebrates the table of her ancestors by savoring her own rediscovered history."-New York Times Book Review

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Page Count

274

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1596917660

ISBN 13

9781596917668

Vertigo

A Memoir

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Vertigo

A Memoir

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

Born to immigrant parents during World War II and coming of age during the 1950s, DeSalvo finds herself rebelling against a script written by parental and societal expectations. In her revealing family memoir, DeSalvo sifts through painful memories to give voice to all that remained unspoken and unresolved in her life: a mother's psychotic depression, a father's rage and violent rigidity, a sister's early depression and eventual suicide, and emerging memories of childhood incest. At times humorous and often brutally candid, DeSalvo also delves through the more recent conflicts posed by marriage, motherhood, and the crisis that started her on the path of her life's work: becoming a writer in order to excavate the meaning of her life and community. In Vertigo, Louise DeSalvo paints a striking picture of the easy freedom of the husband and fatherless world of working-class Hoboken, New Jersey, the neighborhood of her early childhood, where mothers and children had an unaccustomed say in the running of their lives while men were off defending their country, but were jolted back into submission when World War II ended. Hoboken was not a place where girls were encouraged to develop their minds, or their independent spirits, yet it is that tenement-dotted city with its pulse and energy, wonderful Italian pastry, and sidewalk roller-skating contests, and not suburban Ridgefield, where the family moves when Louise is seven, that claims Louise's heart. Written with an honesty that is as rare as it is unsettling, Vertigo also speaks to broader truths about the impact of ethnicity, class, and gender in American life. Offering inspiration and a healthy dose of subversion, this personal story of a writer's life is also a study of the alchemy between lived experience and creativity, and the life-transforming possibilities of this process.

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308

Publisher

Feminist Press at CUNY

Published Date

ISBN 10

1558613951

ISBN 13

9781558613959

The Art of Slow Writing

Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity

By: Louise DeSalvo

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The Art of Slow Writing

Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity

By: Louise DeSalvo

In a series of conversational observations and meditations on the writing process, The Art of Slow Writing examines the benefits of writing slowly. DeSalvo advises her readers to explore their creative process on deeper levels by getting to know themselves and their stories more fully over a longer period of time. She writes in the same supportive manner that encourages her students, using the slow writing process to help them explore the complexities of craft. The Art of Slow Writing is the antidote to self-help books that preach the idea of fast-writing, finishing a novel a year, and quick revisions. DeSalvo makes a case that more mature writing often develops over a longer period of time and offers tips and techniques to train the creative process in this new experience. DeSalvo describes the work habits of successful writers (among them, Nobel Prize laureates) so that readers can use the information provided to develop their identity as writers and transform their writing lives. It includes anecdotes from classic American and international writers such as John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as well as contemporary authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. DeSalvo skillfully and gently guides writers to not only start their work, but immerse themselves fully in the process and create texts they will treasure.

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Page Count

333

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

1250051037

ISBN 13

9781250051035

Casting Off

A Novel

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Casting Off

A Novel

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

Fiction. "Louise DeSalvo's visionary novel—sexy and smart, fresh and timeless—reminds us that the more women's lives have changed, the more they remain the same. Helen and Maive love their families and their men and their deep, honest friendship with each other. Their story might have been written yesterday, and is all the richer when we learn of its own long journey into the light."—Pamela Redmond Satran "Read this book and meet two ballsy, brazen women whose lives are as captivating as the friendship they share. In this exquisite novel, a new world is imagined in which women—married women—make bold choices about sex gleefully and without guilt. CASTING OFF is a keen, funny, and engrossing portrait of the culture in which we live, and two fascinating characters that fearlessly chart their own path."—Emily Bernard "Subversive, feminist, rich in dark humor and erotic intrigue, CASTING OFF opens up the friendship of two women saved by adultery from the deadening effects of childrearing, tedious husbands and sometimes disappointing lovers. Louise DeSalvo's mordant wit and intelligence sparkle through the escapades of Maive and passionate loves of Helen who, between them, perfect the craft of secret, extramarital sex. DeSalvo uses the beds of New York and New Jersey as pathways into a sexuality that encompasses female power in classical myth as well as daily life. Nancy Caronia's powerful, invaluable introduction situates the novel in a broad spectrum of writing by women. Louise DeSalvo, celebrated as a gifted memoirist and accomplished scholar and critic, has brought us a compelling novel."—Josephine G. Hendin "Once deemed 'immoral' and 'perverse,' CASTING OFF now takes its rightful place on North American bookshelves. Erotic and bold, DeSalvo's novel asks what it means for a woman to be sexual, creative, and free."—Julija Šukys

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Page Count

224

Published Date

ISBN 10

1599540649

ISBN 13

9781599540641

The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

As the child of children of immigrants, Louise DeSalvo was at first reluctant to write about her truths. Her abusive father, her sister's suicide, her illness. In this stunning collection of her captivating and frank essays on her life and her Italian-American culture, Louise DeSalvo centers on her beginnings, reframing and revising her acclaimed memoiristic essays, pieces that were the seeds of longer collections, to reveal her true power as a memoirist: the ability to dig ever deeper for personal and political truths that illuminate what it means to be a woman, a child of Italian immigrants, a writer, and a scholar"--

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208

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823279294

ISBN 13

9780823279296

Crazy in the Kitchen

Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Crazy in the Kitchen

Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Page Count

274

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1596917660

ISBN 13

9781596917668

Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise DeSalvo

When literary biographer and memoirist Louise DeSalvo embarked upon a journey to learn why her father came home from World War II a changed man, she didn’t realize her quest would take ten years, and that it would yield more revelations about the man—and herself—and the effect of his military service upon their family than she’d ever imagined. During his last years, as he told her about his life, DeSalvo began to understand that her obsession with war novels and military history wasn’t merely academic but rooted in her desire to understand this complex father whom she both adored and reviled because of his mistreatment of her. Although she at first believes she wants to uncover his story, the story of a man who was no hero but who was nonetheless adversely affected by the his military service, she learns that what she really wants is to recover the man that he was before he went away. As DeSalvo and her father uncover his past piece-by-piece, bit-by-bit, she learns about the dreams of a working-class man who entered the military in the late 1930s during peacetime to better himself, a man who wanted to become a pilot. She learns about what it was like for him to participate in war games in the Pacific prior to the war, and its devastating toll. She learns about what it was like for her parents to fall in love, set up house, marry, and have children during this cataclysmic time. And as the pieces of her father’s life fall into place as works to piece together the puzzle of everything she’s learned about this time, she finds herself finally able to understand him. Chasing Ghosts is an original contribution to the understanding of working-class World War II veterans who did not conventionally distinguish themselves through “heroic” actions and whose lives were not until recently considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. It personalizes the history of those sailors who served in the Navy aboard aircraft carriers and on islands in the Pacific prior to, and during World War II and contributes to the current vital conversation about the often-unrecognized effects of war and its traumas upon those men and their families. It reveals the lifelong devastating consequences of military service on those men and women who fell in love, married, and set up house. And it reveals the complexity of what it is like to be the daughter of a father who has gone to war.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082326873X

ISBN 13

9780823268733

Writing as a Way of Healing

How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives

By: Louise Desalvo

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Writing as a Way of Healing

How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives

By: Louise Desalvo

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Page Count

242

Publisher

Beacon Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807072435

ISBN 13

9780807072431

Vertigo

A Memoir

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Vertigo

A Memoir

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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308

Publisher

Feminist Press at CUNY

Published Date

ISBN 10

1558613951

ISBN 13

9781558613959

Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise De Salvo

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Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise De Salvo

Chasing Ghosts describes how, near the end of his life, the daughter of a veteran of World War II comes to terms with her father, emotionally wounded by his military service through the stories he tells her about his childhood, about his military service in the Navy in the late 1930s, and about his wartime experiences and through her research undertaken to understand her father's life in the context of history. Told through the voice of a daughter seeking answers to her father's life, the narrator journeys into her father's history and the context in which it enfolds. She learns that her father's response had been a mixture of rage and silence and she begins to understand why he has chosen her as an object of his abuse. The narrative provides an understanding of working-class World War II veterans who performed the behind-the-scenes work, like the narrator's father's work as an aviation machinist's mate, necessary to waging war--work that was not conventionally heroic or, until recently, considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. By juxtaposing historical moments in her family's and the country's life, Chasing Ghosts engages in the current necessary conversation about the often unrecognized effects of war and its trauma on World War II veterans, and reinterprets the experience of her father and other such veterans in the context of contemporary understanding about the psychic cost of war and its cross-generational impact on families. In the process, the narrator's lack of knowledge is replaced with empathy for what he's experienced and an understanding of his place in history.

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256

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823268713

ISBN 13

9780823268719

The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

A stunning collection of one writer's beginnings. DeSalvo reframes and revises memoiristic essays that were the seeds of longer collections, to reveal her true power as a memoirist: the ability to dig ever deeper for personal and political truths that illuminate what it means to be a woman, a child of Italian immigrants, a writer, and a scholar.

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Page Count

232

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823279308

ISBN 13

9780823279302

The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise DeSalvo

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The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise DeSalvo

WINNER OF THE IASA BOOK AWARD! AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER! As the child of children of immigrants, Louise DeSalvo was at first reluctant to write about her truths. Her abusive father, her sister’s suicide, her illness. In this stunning collection of her captivating and frank essays on her life and her Italian-American culture, Louise DeSalvo centers on her beginnings, reframing and revising her acclaimed memoiristic essays, pieces that were the seeds of longer collections, to reveal her true power as a memoirist: the ability to dig ever deeper for personal and political truths that illuminate what it means to be a woman, a second-generation American, a writer, and a scholar. Each essay is driven by a complex inquiry that examines the personal, familial, social, ethnic, and historical dimensions of identity. Collectively, they constitute a story significantly different from DeSalvo’s memoirs when they first published, where the starkness of their meaning became blunted by material surrounding them. DeSalvo has also restored material written and then deleted—experiences she was too reticent to reveal before, in writing about her sister’s suicide, her husband’s adultery, her own sexual assault. The essays also include new material to shift the ballast of an essay as her life has changed significantly through the years. The House of Early Sorrows is a courageous exploration not only of the DeSalvo’s family life and times, but also of our own.

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Page Count

309

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823279316

ISBN 13

9780823279319

Breathless

An Asthma Journal

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Breathless

An Asthma Journal

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

For acclaimed memoirist and biographer Louise DeSalvo, who was diagnosed several years ago with asthma, any moment can become a terrifying struggle for air. Here, she applies her searching mind and scholarship to untangle the connections between physical illness, childhood trauma, and the creative mind.

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Page Count

172

Publisher

Beacon Press (MA)

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807070971

ISBN 13

9780807070970

The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise DeSalvo

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The House of Early Sorrows

A Memoir in Essays

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Page Count

309

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823279316

ISBN 13

9780823279319

Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Chasing Ghosts

A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War

By: Louise DeSalvo

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082326873X

ISBN 13

9780823268733

Breathless

An Asthma Journal

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Breathless

An Asthma Journal

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

In an intensely personal account, the author tells how she developed asthma as an adult, searches the lives of her family for causes, and explores the illness's relationship to abuse in the modern world, from environmental crisis to childhood trauma.

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Page Count

153

Publisher

Beacon Press (MA)

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807070963

ISBN 13

9780807070963

Conceived with Malice

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

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Conceived with Malice

By: Louise A. DeSalvo

Evoking Bloomsbury and Paris in the 1920s and '30s, an acclaimed biographer illuminates the dark motives behind masterpieces of 20th-century literature--particularly in the works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. A daring analysis of much never-before-addressed material.

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Page Count

437

Publisher

Plume

Published Date

ISBN 10

0452273234

ISBN 13

9780452273238

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