The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

Overview

From a bestselling memoirist, a thoughtful and provocative story of changing identity, complex sexuality, and enduring family relationships

At age 36, while serving on a jury, author Molly Wizenberg found herself drawn to a female attorney she hardly knew. Married to a man for nearly a decade and mother to a toddler, Wizenberg tried to return to her life as she knew it, but something inside her had changed irrevocably. Instead, she would discover that the trajectory of our lives is rarely as smooth or as logical as we’d like to believe.

Like many of us, Wizenberg had long understood sexual orientation as a stable part of ourselves: we’re “born this way.” Suddenly she realized that her story was more complicated. Who was she, she wondered, if something at her very core could change so radically? The Fixed Stars is a taut, electrifying memoir exploring timely and timeless questions about desire, identity, and the limits and possibilities of family. In honest and searing prose, Wizenberg forges a new path: through the murk of separation and divorce, coming out to family and friends, learning to co-parent a young child, and realizing a new vision of love. The result is a frank and moving story about letting go of rigid definitions and ideals that no longer fit, and learning instead who we really are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419742996
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	166,786
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Molly Wizenberg is the author of two bestselling books, A Homemade Life and Delancey, and the James Beard Award–winning blog Orangette. She has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, Saveur, and Bon Appétit, and she also cohosts the podcast Spilled Milk. With chef Brandon Pettit, Wizenberg cofounded the award-winning Seattle restaurants Delancey and Essex. She lives in Seattle.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/27/2020

In this intimate memoir, Wizenberg (A Homemade Life) shares the story of her changing sexual orientation, the dissolution of her marriage, and the challenges of coming out to her friends and family. While serving on a jury as a 36-year-old married mother of a toddler, Wizenberg became captivated by a female attorney she met. Soon after the trial, she shared her newfound feelings and confusion with her chef and restaurant owner husband, Brandon, who responded with a mix of kindness and fear. Just as “astronomers know that every star is in motion and that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties,” Wizenberg writes, she realized she needed to let go of rigid definitions about identity and face the challenges of navigating the complexities of love. Throughout, she integrates observations from well-known researchers, in particular the work of Lisa Diamond, who found that the norm among women “was not stability in sexual attraction and identity but change.” Wizenberg writes with a remarkable openness about being true to herself and to others, and gives those looking to understand the complicated issue of sexuality a compassionate example of the many forms that love takes. This honest and moving memoir will enlighten and educate those seeking to understand their true selves. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2020

When food writer Wizenberg (A Homemade Life) reports for jury duty, she is surprised to find herself attracted to the female defense attorney. Even though she has been married to her husband for a decade and they have a toddler at home, she can't shake the thought of this woman. What follows is an intimate account of how this chance encounter upended her marriage and set in motion a new direction for her life and for her family. Drawing on the work of queer writers, including Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson, Wizenberg's beautifully written memoir explores what it's like to come out even while continuing to question one's identity and sexual orientation. The book tackles these complicated themes and the meaning of family with compassion and tenderness. VERDICT An essential addition that will resonate with fans of Wizenberg's earlier memoirs and anyone probing the complicated ways that sexuality and traditional family life overlap or diverge.—Erin Shea, Ferguson Lib., CT

Library Journal

2020-02-17
A bestselling memoirist’s account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity.

When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men’s suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day’s proceedings. But guilt at being “a woman wearing a wedding ring” made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the “stars” that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where “nothing happened.” Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed “stone top” who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg’s book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman’s hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference.

A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

A spirited, terrifyingly courageous, and searingly honest memoir of finding sexual identity and strength.

Booklist

Wizenberg is an excellent writer; her meditations on what it means to know yourself—or think you know yourself—and how unpredictable and exciting life really is are a joy to read.

Electric Literature

“The Fixed Stars is a beautiful memoir about desire, divorce, coming out to family and friends and co-parenting through separation.”

Parade

a touching look at modern love and life

Bustle

Through personal recollections, told in quietly beautiful prose you feel the urge to read out loud, she examines what happens before, during and after a seismic shift. A welcome reminder that sometimes feeling lost and found go hand-in-hand

A Cup of Jo

The Fixed Stars is that rare thing, a groundbreaking, essential book about sexuality. Wizenberg’s incisive, generous laying-bare of her own experience will make many readers feel seen, understood, and not alone. This book is a triumph."

author of Blue Plate Special and The Last Cruise - Kate Christensen

"A work of blindsiding beauty."

Shelf Awareness - Nell Beram

The Fixed Stars is a nuanced look into two subjects frequently depicted as binary: love and sexuality. Wizenberg writes of her journey into queerness with tenderness and curiosity, two essential qualities for any sort of entry into new lands. This book spoke directly to my heart. Read it.

author of The Collected Schizophrenias - Esmé Weijun Wang

In The Fixed Stars, Molly Wizenberg tackles the ever-shifting issues of marriage, motherhood, and sexual orientation with the same compassion and unflinching honesty that have become the hallmarks of her writing. She makes the everyday extraordinary and brings depth and complexity to the bigger questions in life. A beautiful read.

author of The Scent Keeper - Erica Bauermeister

The Fixed Stars, like its protagonist, is both brave and sexy, both heady and bodily, and I ripped through this memoir like it was the most erudite romance novel in the world. This is a truly compelling look at sexuality, marriage, and parenthood in this century.

author of All Adults Here and The Vacationers - Emma Straub

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