How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. Art. Gloria Frym has written a love story about how we read and why we read, and the way books invade our psyches and change our lives. Within these pages are her encounters with Proust and Flaubert and Dickinson and Whitman, and they are for her what the great cities of the world are to life-long travelers, dream destinations, whole worlds. Her lucid and wide ranging thoughts make for necessary reading now more than ever, because books Frym proves here can save us still.--Tom Barbash

HOW PROUST RUINED MY LIFE & OTHER ESSAYS by Gloria Frym--one of America's finest, most crucial poets and prose writers--is a treasure culled from a lifetime of reading widely, freely, carefully, with passion, intellect, and curiosity. Frym reads not for erudition or pedantry, but for the deep pleasure of entering another's created world. Her sphere of reading--which spans the work of San Francisco County Jail inmates to Proust, Emerson, Chekov, Flaubert, her dear friend Lucia Berlin, her teacher and mentor Robert Creeley, even the beloved Grimm Brothers (and this is just a short list)--is an ever-shifting prismatic globe where one arrives as Gulliver does, starved, shipwrecked along the shores of Jonathan Swift, grateful to be alive. These essays were written at different times in Frym's life, many presented at conferences, festivals, classrooms, yet they compose an immediate seamlessness in her calm, undisturbed, inviting prose, a translucency that brings us close to the act of reading as immersion. Frym reminds us that reading is correspondence, even friendship, an intimacy in which we are 'breathing deeply the oxygen of another writer.' I loved this book for its love, for its generosity, for at last delineating the differences between Niedecker and Dickinson, and for taking me back to reading sentence for sentence, word for word.--Gillian Conoley

In this wonderful assemblage of essays, Gloria Frym liberates the act of reading from the confines of the page. She leads us into the open air where the personal and the public intersect and create a new avenue of possibilities: the book in the hand, the world outside your window. Especially memorable are the probing essays on Jean Toomer and Lorine Niedecker, and her homage to David Meltzer. HOW PROUST RUINED MY LIFE is a timeless book and deserves a wide audience.--Lewis Warsh