Notes from the Bottom of the World: A Life in Chile

by Suzanne Adam

Overview

Chile—named the Lonely Planet 2017 destination of the year—has been Suzanne Adam’s home for over four decades. She knows the territory—its culture, its idiosyncrasies, and its exotic landscapes, from Patagonian glaciers to the northern Atacama Desert. In this heartfelt collection of sixty-three personal essays, she searches for universal truths and sparks of beauty revealed in small, daily moments both in her native land—the United States—and in Chile. She considers how her American past and move to Chile have shaped her life and enriched her worldview, and she explores with insight questions on aging, women’s roles, spiritual life, friendship, love, and writers who inspire.

In a return trip to Colombia fifty years after her two-year stay there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Adam reflects on the mark left on her by that experience. Finally, she crosses America from east to west, immersing herself in regional cultures and discovering a common thread of reciprocity throughout.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631524158
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

A California native, Suzanne Adam served in the Peace Corps in Colombia before moving to Santiago, Chile in 1972 to marry her boyfriend, Santiago. She explores how this experience shaped her life in her 2015 memoir Marrying Santiago. Adam admits to being a tree-hugger, avid reader, nature writer, gardener, CNN news junkie, bird watcher, lover of storms and laughter, and doting granny. Before turning to writing, she worked as a teacher of learning-disabled children. Her essays have been published in The Christian Science Monitor, California Magazine, the Marin Independent Journal, Nature Writing, and Persimmon Tree. She blogs at www.tarweedspirit.blogspot.com.

Editorial Reviews

2019 Sarton Women's Book Awards Finalist in Memoir

“A lyrical meditation on the meaning of place and home . . . A poignant collection to cherish.”
—Marjorie Agosín, author of I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“Notes from the Bottom of the World truly demonstrates that Suzanne Adam is an observer and writer par excellence of and about nature, travel, and living a life in a country not of her birth.”
—Marian Haley Beil, Publisher, PeaceCorpsWorldwide.org

“In this tender, irresistible collection of personal essays, Suzanne Adam writes with quiet passion, sensitivity, and often achingly beautiful insight about her experiences, particularly the exquisite tension of sharing one’s heart between two cultures.”
—Allyson Latta, literary editor and University of Toronto creative writing instructor

“As we age, we naturally try to connect the loose ends of our lives. Let Suzanne Adams be your guide as she revisits her roots in California, Colombia, and Chile.”
—John L. Rector, author of The History of Chile

“I laughed, I cried, and I identified with the nurturing care Adam had dispersed. This book is a testament to the life surging within the body of a seventieth woman.”
—OnlineBookClub

From the Publisher

2018-09-03

Adam (Marrying Santiago, 2015) looks back on an accidental life in Chile from the perspective of nearly 50 years.

The author, a California native, traces her life journey, beginning with her 1972 move to Chile and marriage. The narrative is less a memoir than a collection of blog post-like anecdotes—a mixed blessing. Adam moves from moment to moment, subject to subject in a series of serendipitous slices of life, but readers will be left looking for a set of throughlines to help the vignettes add up. The author is an adequate writer—"away from city noises," she observes in one short essay, "I notice the sounds of the wind: soughing through pine branches, howling around the eaves of the house, whistling through electric wires"—and there is a kind of tactile immediacy to the language, a physicality to the scenes. Unfortunately, as the book progresses, there is less to compel us. For all Adam promises to tell us about Chile, her life is not so different from those of upper-middle-class people everywhere. She writes, for instance, about the decision to let her hair grow gray or the way that playing with her grandchildren allows her to feel young. All of this material is fair game, but it is hardly unique. If a writer is going to take on daily life in an engrossing way, there must be something in her expression to illuminate the experience, to get beneath the surface and light it from within. Instead, Adam offers lists or commonplaces—e.g., what she bought at the market, what she said to the gardener—without any particular nuance or insight. Even late in the book, when she chronicles her return to Colombia, where she was in the Peace Corps, the stakes feel inessential and underexplored.

Adam's life has many intriguing elements, but her experiences are too often flat and formless on the page.

Kirkus Reviews