About this item
Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on. This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You dont write that book as a linear progression - you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if youre as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello. What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from the childhood tables of "arts and crafts" to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us. The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative. "Im one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood," Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe youre one of Mary Cappellos people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.
About the Author
Mary Cappello composes essays, memoir, literary nonfiction and experiments in prose, always with the aim of bringing a poetic sensibility into concert with a scholarly ethos. Cappello likes to take on unfathomables and to find, or invent, a form for them. She likes to write about things that are fundamental to our being but beyond our comprehension. Often enough, her work treats the ungraspable center of language itself. Her six books include a mnemic collage based on a twinned legacy of violence and creativity in her Italian/American family; an anti-chronicle meant to thwart the ritualized routine of breast cancer treatment in the US; a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness--ontological, diplomatic, aesthetic, and social; discursive double portraits on the forms that friendship took between gay men and lesbians during the AIDS epidemic; a lyric biography of a medical pioneer and his cabinet of swallowed and aspirated things; and, most recently, the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (University of Chicago Press, 2016) . Her work appears frequently in literary journals and anthologies as well as in more popular venues such as the New York Times, on NPR, in guest author blogs and in on-line dialog with other writers and thinkers. Her theoretical and pedagogical writing about the essay addresses such matters as queer aesthetics; discursive autobiography; epistolary critique; the uncommon archive; digression; alternative histories of the essay; the essay in performance; creative nonfiction and lyric essay; and the very question of whether creative writing can be taught. Cappello's numerous literary, research, and teaching honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, and a Berlin Prize; The Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies; and The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer (Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow) , and Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. Visit her at her website: www.marycappello.com.
