Bodies Adjacent: Ardyth's Memoir & Egon's Journal

by Ardyth Kennelly, Egon V Ullman

Overview

Part memoir, part confession, part journal, Bodies Adjacent is the story of two lives told by each one about the other. The novelist Ardyth Kennelly and her physician husband, the Jewish Viennese émigré Egon V. Ullman, began their unlikely love affair in the heart of Oregon's Willamette Valley in the 1930s and continued it for nearly three decades in Portland-contending first with the Depression, then the disruptions of the war, and finally sudden fame, as well as their own personal demons.

Writing thirty years after Egon's untimely death in 1962, Ardyth looks back with a deeper understanding of their lives than she had possessed during her self-conscious younger years. She tells us something of her early life and of Egon's history; laments her ignorance of the love he must have felt for his home country; shares her impressions of the Jewish refugees and émigrés he knew in Portland; remembers his loving and indulgent care for her; confesses her sorrow and regret for how she treated him in his illness and death; and spins some fanciful stories to illustrate how their life together began and ended.

In the middle of her memoir, Ardyth places the journal that Egon kept-at her suggestion-during the years when she was writing her first five novels (1947-56). His fascination with her talent, intellect, and charm never wavered through all their personal troubles. Their shared love of books and the desire to write brought them together and remained a major focus of their life in marriage.

Bodies Adjacent is a captivating and singular love story-painfully honest, yet utterly enchanting and sweet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990432029
Publisher:	Sunnycroft Books
Publication date:	10/12/2023
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Ardyth Kennelly (1912-2005) was the author of five novels published between 1949 and 1956, including two best-sellers, and one published posthumously, in 2014. Ardyth's roots were in Salt Lake City, with an Irish Catholic father and a Swedish-Norwegian Mormon mother, but she was born in tiny Glenada, Oregon. She grew up in Salt Lake City and Albany, Oregon, attended Oregon State College in Corvallis (now Oregon State University), and lived most of the rest of her life in Portland.Ardyth began publishing poems and short stories at age 15 and gained national fame with her first novel, The Peaceable Kingdom, based on the life of her maternal grandmother, a second wife in polygamy in late-nineteenth-century Utah. She married the Viennese émigré Egon V. Ullman, a physician, in 1940, sharing with him a lifelong love of books and literature. She also had a second career late in life as a collage and mixed-media artist, with her strikingly original pieces exhibited in Portland galleries.

Egon V. Ullman (1894-1962) was born in Vienna and studied medicine at the university there. He gained prominence as an eye, ear, nose, and throat physician, and in 1926 he emigrated from Austria to the United States. Practicing in Corvallis, Oregon, he also gave lectures in biology and physiology at Oregon State College. He moved his practice to Portland in 1932 and the following year published a book, Diet in Sinus Infections and Colds. In 1935 he became reacquainted in Portland with a former patient, the author Ardyth Kennelly. They married in 1940 and shared an intense, lifelong love of books and literature.