| Biography & Autobiography |
| Women |
| Feminism & Feminist Theory |
| Social Science |
Summary
Summary
"Rich and moving . . . Pure Flame may be Orange's legacy. It is already her gift." --Maggie Doherty, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)
During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.
So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy--in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review , about her mother's midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called "the great unwritten story": that of the mother-daughter bond.
The death of Orange's maternal grandmother at nearly ninety-six and the fear that her mother's more "successful" life will not be as long bring new urgency to her questions about the woman whose absence and anger helped shape her life. Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it. Told with warmth and rigor, Orange's account of her mother's life and their relationship is pressurized in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in an essential, revelatory meditation on becoming, selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter now.
Author Notes
Michelle Orange is the author of the essay collection This Is Running for Your Life , named a best book of 2013 by The New Yorker . Her writing has appeared in publications including The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , The New York Times , Bookforum , McSweeney's , and the Virginia Quarterly Review , where she is a contributing editor. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at Goucher College and Columbia University.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The societal pressures and internal forces that shape a woman's identity drive this often brilliant, but occasionally mired, cultural memoir by Orange (This Is Running for Your Life) that's laced with ruminations on gender, feminism, and self-determination. Throughout, she draws on quotes by Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Hardwick, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sontag, but the narrative's spine is Orange's fragile relationship with her prickly mother. ("Mother-daughter relationships are generally catastrophic," according to Beauvoir). An unhappy 1970s Canadian housewife, Orange's mother took a job at a bank, where for branch promotions "they had her bake cakes," as Orange wincingly recalls, and "she would dress in a clown costume... willing to make a fool of herself." Within a decade she earned an MBA, became v-p of a financial services company, and, emotionally speaking, was "already gone," having learned "to bend the tricks of men" toward her own career ambitions. Yet she also hid a chronic, ultimately terminal lung condition, which Orange only discovered when her mother was in her 70s and approaching death. Their formerly distant relationship grew closer over lengthy text exchanges, reproduced here as if poems. Orange's unsentimental language balances poignancy and intellectualism, though her analysis tends to go on a bit too long. At its heart, this is an affecting mother-daughter saga. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency (June)
Kirkus Review
Orange investigates the legacy of her self-empowered mother as well as expressions of cultural and political feminism. In this follow-up to This Is Running for Your Life (2013), the author describes her mother as having "lived out a neoclassical epic of self-determination: 1970s housewife turned MBA turned CEO" and their estrangement as a requirement of her mother's emancipation. Approaching 40, Orange feels called to know her mother and, as the daughter of a feminist, to gauge the costs and rewards. Using "inquiry as an act of love," the author admits that her "own becoming was both guided and thwarted by a determined effort not to become her." Orange braids together memories of her maternal grandmother; stories about and told by her mother; texts between mother and daughter; scenes of their time together; and innumerable quotations from and references to authors, activists, and subjects ranging from Emmeline Pankhurst to Susan Sontag, from whom Orange got her title: "Indeed I did not think of myself as a woman first of all…I wanted to be pure flame." When Orange was a child, in Canada, her mother sought a better-paying job that demanded she move far from her family. Recounting this ambitious decision, Harvard Business Review published "Confronting Sex Role Stereotypes: The Janis/Jack Jerome Cases" in 1989. Her mother's scenario (as Janis) was presented next to Jack's, identical other than the subject's gender. The study's respondents approved of Jack's choice to move while disapproving of Janis'. This serves as one lens through which mother and daughter examined feminism. About her female relatives, Orange texted, "I didn't really think of any of you as role models." Her mother replied, "Maybe not consciously." The text messages bring the author's mother to life, capturing her incisive wit and views, and over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that Orange and her mother commune best as critics, more cerebral than emotional, neither single-pointed nor conventional. The prismatic effect of Orange's multidimensional approach is brilliant, illuminative, and moving. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Essayist and journalist Orange (This Is Running for Your Life, 2013) never would have imagined that texting with her mother would finally bridge the gap between them, but when it did, their exchanges propelled this delving inquiry into "legacy, feminism, and failure." In a weave of memoir, history, and reflection, Orange judiciously considers the lives of her mother and her mother's mother within the larger context of women's ongoing battles for equality and liberation. The catalyst is her mother's transformation, succinctly described as "1970s housewife turned MBA turned CEO," which involved her pursuing her career even when it meant that she spent the work week in another city, away from her young daughters and husband. So radical was this choice, it became the basis of a case study used in business courses to expose gender bias. In gleaming prose of tensile strength, Orange considers the painful paradoxes of women's lives and mother-daughter relationships, drawing on the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Adrienne Rich, while tracking her seemingly indomitable mother's long-brewing lung disease and her ultimate battle between mind and body.
