Kirjahaku

For all fans of Carol Shields and Jane Smiley: a warm, wise and wonderful evocation of family love and redemption set on an island off Seattle. No family is ordinary, but this family is less ordinary than most… When Sunny returns to her mother’s house on Isadora Island off the west coast of Seattle with her small daughter, Brio, in tow, she’s in retreat from her mad, difficult life in LA. Celia’s famous B&B, Henry’s House, a tranquil oasis, seems the perfect place to recover and give Brio a sense of real family life. But Celia’s life has been anything but ordinary. Strong, beautiful and independent, with a tragedy in her past, Celia has always believed in unfettered love, and took many male lovers and partners, and had children by a number of them. Her three children, half-sisters Sunny, Victoria and Elizabeth, have followed different paths to their mother: Sunny, nursing her own secret; Victoria, secretly married to her husband years ago but too scared to tell the disapproving Celia; and Celia’s favourite, the free-spirited Bethie, who has just announced her engagement to Wade, an ex-drug addict survivor who now runs a personal development programme for other ‘Re-coverees’. The whole extended family gather on the Island at Henry’s House for Bethie’s engagement party, and there the true strength of family love is put to the test….

The memoir is not the story of what you know, it's the story of how you learned it.Memory into Memoir provides a lively guide for anyone looking to wrestle the unruly past onto the page. In thirteen chapters, Laura Kalpakian provides tools to develop narrative form, scenic depiction, character development, and dialogue. There are chapters devoted to excavating the Family Story and the slippery Truth, especially when telling stories not solely your own. Kalpakian explores the use of letters, diaries, and photographs, and she offers tips for research, publishing choices, and the uses of music. With a broad exploration of technique and development, and a range of reference, Memory into Memoir includes examples, extensive resources, and animating prompts. The seasoned writer, the aspiring writer, and the reluctant writer looking for a knowledgeable, encouraging companion will find Memory into Memoir the go-to guide for a successful, fulfilling writing experience.

The powerful true story of a parent’s unflagging battle on behalf of a beloved son struggling with PTSD, mental illness, and addiction and a family who bore the burdens of war for decades. In January 1969, angry after a fight with his father, nineteen-year-old Doug Johnson—in what will be a fateful choice—decides to enlist in the Army. Once in Vietnam as a point man, Doug becomes addicted to speed and heroin, goes AWOL multiple times, and is court martialed and imprisoned. In order to avoid a second court martial, he agrees to accept an “undesirable” discharge that denies him veterans’ benefits and any recognition of his wartime service. In late August 1970, drugged, malnourished, and clutching the sandal of a dead Viet Cong, Doug staggers off a plane into the arms of his father. But Doug’s return home is only the beginning of this story. The core of Undesirable recounts another war: Doug’s father against the US Army. For three years, he fights to have his son’s “undesirable” discharge changed to “honorable.” Half a century later Laura Kalpakian—devoted daughter and sister—exhumes the evidence her father collected. From this trove of documents she assembles a heartbreaking story of a father’s love for his son and a son’s experience at war. Undesirable: A Father’s Odyssey demands that we ask what we—and our government—owe to our veterans for the physical, psychological, and emotional sacrifices they and their families make.

A collection of short stories by American author Laura Kalpakian. These stories follow the lives of characters whose obsession with the past illuminates their otherwise ordinary lives.

To write a memoir is to take the grains of sand-individuals and particulars- and shape them into sandcastles. To make artful narrative of experience that, in the living of it, might have seemed random, even chaotic. Writing a memoir tames the unruly past, but it does not make it docile.Celebrated novelist Laura Kalpakian grew up in Southern California amid a blending of vastly different cultures. Her mother was born in Constantinople, only a toddler when the family, multi-lingual, urbanite Armenians, left Turkey and immigrated to Los Angeles after World War I. Her father joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, uprooting from an Idaho tribe of restless, rural, hardscrabble Mormons. These memoir essays explore both sides' colorful anecdotal inheritance as, over generations, their stories are codified, re-shaped to process unspoken pain.With candor and humor Kalpakian chronicles her stint as a teen reporter and gossip columnist. As a wayward apprentice in her twenties she lollygags through Paris imagining herself to be a writer, but lacking the courage to write. She masquerades as a graduate student among the ponderous Structuralists while secretly writing stories, none of them published. One of these stories escalates into one hundred pages, blossoms into a novel that sells to a major publishing house and collects critical applause. Commercially, the book flops. Her second novel, These Latter Days is rejected and her powerful editor dies. Returning to California, now the single mother of two young sons, she refuses to give up on These Latter Days-a book ironically rooted in Mormon traditions she had long since spurned, and a town she thought she had left behind forever.The Unruly Past asks questions of the author's past: the Armenian diaspora, Mormon tribalism, the warring instincts to revel or preserve, raising children in order to let them go. These essays are not content to simply tell what happened. They explore the larger, deeper chasms, the cracks and fissures of what must be imagined before it can be remembered.

"Sacred to the Memory of Elvis," proclaims a homely, front porch memorial in a shabby neighborhood. Even years after his death, Joyce Jackson keeps the Christmas lights twinkling, and the flowers fresh. She keeps the faith as she builds a life for her two daughters, Priscilla and Lisa Marie. Joyce's benevolence is inspired by Elvis, but her vision is entirely her own. Her generosity of spirit resonates among a cast of memorable characters: holy rollers, rock and rollers, cops and robbers, refugees and social workers-one of whom inadvertently reawakens Joyce's old nemesis.Marge Mason believes that Joyce is a welfare cheat with bad taste in men and music and too much spunk for a woman on public assistance. In this contest, Joyce will need every bit of her strength and spiritual largesse.Rippling with rhythm and the blues, Graced Land celebrates the power of music and love connecting the iconic King with a struggling single mother.

The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Roxanne Granville is used to getting what she wants--even if she has to break the rules. But after a falling-out with her grandfather, a powerful movie mogul, she has to face life on her own for the first time.... Roxanne forges a career unique for women in the 1950s, becoming an agent for hungry young screenwriters. She struggles to be taken seriously by the men who rule Hollywood and who often assume that sexual favors are just a part of doing business. When she sells a script by a blacklisted writer under the name of a willing front man, more exiled writers seek her help. Roxanne wades into a world murky with duplicity and deception, and she can't afford any more risks. Then she meets Terrence Dexter, a compelling African American journalist unlike anyone she's ever known. Roxanne again breaks the rules, and is quickly swept up in a passionate relationship with very real dangers that could destroy everything she's carefully built. Roxanne Granville is a woman who bravely defies convention. She won't let men make all the rules, and won't let skin color determine whom she can love. The Great Pretenders is a riveting, emotional novel that resonates in today's world, and reminds us that some things are worth fighting for.

Francis Carson, brilliant British novelist, renowned for his lyrical prose, his drinking, and his womanizing, was a free spirit who crashed through life. In February 1950 he was found dead in the Garden of Allah swimming pool. Diffident Quentin Castle-newly-married, a lowly junior partner in his father's firm, Castle Literary Agency-must convey this terrible news to the widow in Oxfordshire. Claire Carson's plight, impoverished, alone with three small children, her dignity, her desolation, her deep blue eyes awaken in Quentin wholly new emotions. In a spasm of gallantry, he promises to escort Francis's body home to England from California. Regent Films are making a movie of Carson's best known book in sun-splashed Hollywood. As a Brit, accustomed to austere, pinched, post-war London, Quentin navigates uneasily through artifice and opulence. The top executives at Regent treat him with conventional sympathy, polite condescension, and something obscure, tinged with evasion. But these few days in California-and a weekend in Mexico-will change Quentin Castle forever.His subsequent choices-variously brilliant, audacious and unethical-are enveloped in impenetrable layers of betrayal that will crack, crumble, and finally destroy.

Young Marcella McNeill's family are always rehearsing: her father is an actor, her mother Valerie an aspiring opera singer, her grandmother Gloria a renowned violinist. During the summer of 1969 - after their parents' bitter divorce - Marcella and her little sister Rose-Renee are sent to live with their enigmatic grandmother in her decaying countryside mansion. Instructed never to disturb the formidable woman as she endlessly rehearses in the music room, the children are left to run wild. They form a relationship with their cheerful neighbour Dorothea, who convinces their grandmother to allow the girls to be home-schooled with her sickly son, Rodney. Dorothea recognizes and nurtures the children's gifts in ways they have never before experienced. That autumn, their wayward aunt Linda returns home with a drawling, Arkansas boyfriend in tow. The struggles between mother and daughter - Gloria angry that Linda has abused and denied her gifts, Linda attacking her mother's musical delusions - create a storm of clashing egos. The Music Room is a novel of arrogance and artistry, of sacrifice and negligence, of delusion and conviction, of interminable rehearsal and profound performance.It is a story of love muddied with need, expedience, and opportunism - as love always is.