In Praise of Inadequate Gifts

by Tarn Wilson

Overview

Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award, Tarn Wilson's memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts explores the varied ways we cope with trauma and loss-and the miraculous, awkward, and imperfect process of renewal.

Wilson explores a wide range of topics: her obsession with teeth, why she doesn't have children, the summer she spent soldering keyboards for Chrysler Le Barons. She traces the effects of her mother's rape, her confusion after her friend's mother is murdered, her own divorce and struggle with anxiety, and her complex grief after the death of her distant father and mentally ill mother.

 

Wilson considers these difficult experiences with curiosity and gentle humor. Her honesty, empathy, and lack of self-pity make us feel we are sitting down with a trusted friend, inviting us to give voice to our own hard journey. Ultimately, this collection is about the redemptive power of kindness and connection. "Love's gestures are so unassuming, so ordinary, so clumsy, so imperfect - yet, miraculously, they hold something larger than themselves, big enough to press back against the darkness." 

 

Through her experimentation with form, Wilson's multifaceted reflections reveal how we come to understand our stories and the choices we make as we construct the narrative of our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578362823
Publisher:	Wandering Aengus Press
Publication date:	03/17/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	107
File size:	336 KB

About the Author

Tarn Wilson is the author of In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award (2021) and The Slow Farm (Ovenbird Books: Judith Kitchen Selects, 2014), plus the forthcoming 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Your Creativity and Inspire You to Write (Rockridge Press, 2022). Her personal essays have been published in numerous journals, including Brevity, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, and The Sun. She is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is a high school teacher and the founder of Creator School, which offers creative writing courses to teens and adults.

Table of Contents

I

The History of My Teeth

My Perfect Little Life

Loveland

Whatever Gets You Through the Night

Disaster Man

II

Hide and Seek with the Dead

A Narrative Break: On Reading After Crisis

Big Kitty

Old Laundromats

III

Faithful Over a Few Things

Why We Don't Have Children

In Praise of Inadequate Gifts

Editorial Reviews

In her rich and diverse collection of essays, "In Praise of Inadequate Gifts," Tarn Wilson guides us generously through both traumas and hard-earned joys, holding fast to "that quiet self at my hidden center." Despite a childhood with a depressive mother who could descend into "quicksand darkness," an absent father, the death of both parents within a year, and the dissolution of her own long marriage, Wilson holds on for a "sweeter" life. The gifts she offers her lucky readers are hardly inadequate. Whether her subjects are mountain lions or wisdom teeth or an old laundromat where she discovers "that strange, alternate universe which is grief," her essays remind us that finally it is love that holds our world together, a "love that gives without even the memory of it, like breath."

-Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings

In her memoir-in-essays, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, Tarn Wilson explores the intricacies of grief, the possibility of survival, and the hard lessons we learn from life's accumulating challenges. Told with a clear-eyed sensibility and a belief in the power of redemption, these essays are honest, powerful, and necessary.

-Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

A good essayist, like a good scientist, proceeds by asking hard questions while refusing to settle for easy answers. In this rich collection, Tarn Wilson pursues a cluster of haunting questions: How can she recover from a chaotic childhood-her parents' divorce, mentally ill mother, neglectful hippie father, abusive stepfather, periodic poverty, frequent uprooting from schools and homes? What brought on her own divorce? Why has she remained childless? Is there an afterlife? How has reading shaped her "moral center"? How has writing eased her grief? Although Wilson draws on her personal history, these essays will surely resonate with readers who have faced their own hard questions.

-Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination

The true gift of Tarn Wilson's In Praise of Inadequate Gifts is this author's compassion-toward herself, her family, her students, and the world. In a voice both companionable and smart, Wilson shows us how we can tell the stories that matter, even when our hearts have broken.

-Brenda Miller, author of An Earlier Life

The opening essay in Tarn Wilson's new collection is called "The History of My Teeth," and I fell in love on the very first page. Tarn Wilson is an irresistible writer, and her new book, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, is a treasure. Buy it, read it, and tell everyone you know.

-Abigail Thomas, author of What Comes Next and How to Like It

From the Publisher