The Book: Excerpts

Naomi has been working on a collection of first-person, narrative nonfiction essays (or lyrical true stories) since 1999. A first draft of the manuscript was completed in September 2004. The final draft of the manuscript was finished in May 2005. The manuscript consists of nineteen essays, or roughly 40,000 words. Excerpts are below.

Wondering what the book is about? Listen to Naomi as she tries to explain.

From For a Dark and Stormy Night:

"I would go there alone as often as I could in summer. I would drop my bike at the edge, hopefully out of sight, and then I would walk out into the gentle stalks until I found a place that felt just right to lie down in. From down there, on my back, the whole world was heaven-scented. The grass beneath me was cool and itched my bare arms and legs just enough to remind me that I was human, and not actually part of the wildflower field I had immersed myself in. I felt the tilting of the planet beneath me, and sometimes I laced my fingers through the grass and gripped it tightly, hanging on. I looked up into the sky, my vision framed by green stalks and soothing pastel-colored flowers, and I watched the clean white clouds swim across the sky. I came to think of the lupine as my friends and my protectors, always rooted there around me, dancing slightly in the salty mud-scented breezes of the tidal river and its mud flats, androgynous sentries, keeping out all the ugliness of the world and providing me with comfort, safety, privacy and the nourishment that comes from fresh, flower-scented air in one's nostrils."

From My Mother's Box of Me:

"I sent myself a time capsule from my own mother, a package that arrived unexpectedly from deep in the cold space between us, and it carried a message of peace."

From The Scene of the Crime:

"I felt the slam, and the crunch, but I couldn't yet grasp that I was spinning, no longer on my way to someplace nice. "

From The Light in the Tunnel:

"He left my life as quickly as the light will do when the switch is flicked; and his reasons were as mysterious as the sinking of the sun would be, if you didn't know to expect it."

From How I Know My Mother Loves Me:

"I was kneeling in the dirt when she told me. I was elbow deep in green, exercising my right to choose which plants were pulled as weeds. My flowerbed was overgrown, and the unwanted things were about to outmatch the ones I had so lovingly planted in the spring. It was a slow and gentle process done in stages over days. It took careful hands to identify and pull out the thriving weeds without damaging the fledgling flowers and herbs, which were being trampled by a riot of uninvited guests."

From Love. And Basketball:

"There were backs all around me, with talking heads attached, heads which now and again would turn to smile at me, standing there, alone. But the expression in their eyes never matched the one across their lips."

From Sock and Awe:

"For four months, my lover played this push-pull game with me. She drew me to her and we dove, rapid and deep to depths that were tremendous. But then she'd push me away with such a totalitarianism that it was like smacking into an invisible wall after coasting downhill on her handlebars. Every time, I was smiling when I hit. And I was always surprised when I found myself again, toothless, fat-lipped and bleeding on the pavement, alone when just a second before her touch had been warming my skin."

Thank you for reading. Now you can:

 

 

The photo on this page was taken by Elizabeth Solaka in Northampton, Massachusetts.