Pure Flame: A Legacy

An intellectual, personal, and ultimately ferocious reckoning with feminism, family, and motherhood from celebrated critic Michelle Orange

A searing work of cultural memoir, Michelle Orange's Pure Flame explores illness, mortality, and questions of maternal legacy in the context of modern feminism. It tells the story of three women--Orange's grandmother, her mother, and herself, born at the beginning, the middle, and toward the end of the twentieth century, respectively, and tracing, through their relationships, the impact and influence of that century's feminist movements. A question asked during a 1971 gathering of some of the era's most powerful female writers, thinkers, and activists--including Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, and Elizabeth Hardwick--informs much of the book's blend of social, cultural, and personal inquiry: If a woman is not to model herself after her mother, by whose example should she live?

In Pure Flame, Orange grapples with this question and reckons with her mother's life choices, including leaving her young family in order to transform herself from housewife to MBA to CEO--a personally rewarding but grueling journey that would cause her to develop lung disease. Orange's account of their lives becomes pressurizing in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in a revelatory portrait of love, loss, and the endlessly complex and fascinating mother-daughter bond.