Vertigo / Edition 1

by Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta

Overview

A scholar’s memoir of growing up and the powerful forces that shaped her as a woman and a writer; “her story will inspire all women” (Library Journal).

In this honest and outspoken reflection on her childhood, Louise DeSalvo explores the many ways literature saved her, both emotionally and practically. Born to Italian immigrants during World War II, DeSalvo takes readers back to the emotional chaos of her 1950s girlhood in New Jersey, growing up with her authoritative, distant father, her depressed mother, and a sister who later committed suicide. Reading and research were an anchor to her then, and widened her choices about her future in ways that weren’t otherwise available to girls of that era.

A Virginia Woolf scholar, DeSalvo wrote a ground-breaking study on the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the reclusive writer. Here, she mines her own early days—and her adolescent obsession with Hitchcock’s Vertigo—in an attempt to give her own life’s path “some shape, some order.”

Publisher’s Weekly said, “Her clarity of insight and expression make this [memoir] an impressive achievement,” and the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed, “DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558613959
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Series:	The Cross-Cultural Memoir Series
Edition description:	1ST FEMINI
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
	Prologue	xxxi
1	Fixing Things	1
2	My Sister's Suicide	13
3	Combat Zones	38
4	Finding My Way	66
5	Safe Houses	87
6	Colored Paper	116
7	Spin the Bottle	130
8	Boy Crazy	145
9	Vertigo	161
10	The Still Center of the Turning Wheel	189
11	Anorexia	200
12	A Portrait of the Puttana as a Woman in Midlife	219
13	Personal Effects	242

Editorial Reviews

"The writing here is terrific." —Los Angeles Times

"DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around." —San Francisco Chronicle

"One of the pleasures of Vertigo is its continual sense that DeSalvo's own history is as mysterious to her as it might be to us, that she, like her reader, is a stranger in a strange land, a perpetual traveler." —Newsday

From the Publisher