Stray By Stephanie



Stephanie Danler is from California. And like much of one dominant image of the state, her words are wet-haired, sandy, and moody beyond even her own sense of belief. After a decade away, spent out East, she returned to California at thirty-one. She had strayed far, to Kenyon College and then on to New York. You're viewing: Stray: A Memoir by Stephanie Danler $ 25.95 Select options Pre-order your hardcover release of Stray: A Memoir by Stephanie Danler from Lawn Gnome Publishing before May 19th, 2020! From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival. It’s been 36 hours since I finished Stephanie Danler’s new book, and I’m still parsing through the feelings it surfaced. Stray is a memoir, a collection of essays. It’s fearless, insightful, devastating, and beautiful. It broke my heart, and it twisted up my insides. The stories are still sitting in my gut.

WHO: Stephanie Danler

WHAT: STRAY, a memoir

WHEN: Published by Knopf May 19, 2020

WHERE: The author lives in Los Angeles.

Stray by stephanie

WHY: “A rare and skillfully structured view of an artist’s love, grief, and growth.
“Early in this memoir, Stephanie Danler establishes, ‘I made up stories from the minute I could speak.’ This skill for storytelling, readers learn, would help her survive and make sense of challenging experiences, and gifts her writing with an exhilarating readability and sense of plot.
“She divides the memoir into three parts: Mother, Father, and Monster. With each short chapter labeled with its location, most in the Southern California homeland she’s just returned to following her divorce, Danler knits together the stories of her long-divorced parents and the effects of their addictions on her self-formation. She keeps a strong tie to the present throughout, and to the Monster, as she calls the married man she loves, as she anticipates the publication of her first novel, passes her days writing in her Laurel Canyon cottage, and gets to know the puzzlingly sweet Love Interest.
“Acknowledging both the tribute of memory and the mercy of forgetting with one distinctive voice, this is a rare and skillfully structured view of an artist’s love, grief, and growth.” —Annie Bostrom, BOOKLIST

“A writer’s memoir of familial dysfunction and addiction…as well-written as her novel Sweetbitter.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

. . . . .

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK:

The list of things I thought I knew but did not know grew quickly during my first weeks back in Los Angeles. A hummingbird dropped dead: its wings stopped pounding, gravity took over, its body jumped when it hit the wooden deck. I didn’t know that the water in my bird feeder was moldy.

Stray Stephanie Danler Pdf

An omen? asks Eli, who is sunning himself in my yard, his tan a mark of leisure, unemployment, and depression. It’s 2015 and he’s living in San Francisco, his “start-up” circling the drain, his bank accounts depleted by a summer in Mykonos, Spain, Tel Aviv. But here he is, hopping commuter flights to Los Angeles based on his whims or mine, coming home at eight a.m. from an after-after-hours party (I thought you were at breakfast, I would say, already at my desk, and he’d laugh in my face before passing out in my bed fully clothed, cigarette smoke wafting up). He slept off entire days, weeks, months of his life. Oh to be Eli, was what we said behind his back. It seemed that no triviality of responsibility, debt, or consequence could ever latch on to him.

Is it possible it’s a good omen? I ask.

No, says Eli.

Stephanie

I stare at the bird and wonder why it chose me to witness its death. I’ve always been ashamed of the Southern California mysticism I’ve kept. But there it is, the belief in a divine pattern just outside my field of vision. It’s given me this seeking frame of mind that never resolves or rests but wants to move me closer to a fundamental truth. Mystics, I find, ask why before who what where when how, a tendency that leaves them bereft of practical knowledge. And this is Los Angeles, a town full of oracles, con men, real estate speculators, all high on self-delusion, self-gratification, marijuana, and a shitload of quartz.


Media Resources:
About the book and author | Download the jacket | Download the author photo

Stray Stephanie Danler Australia

Knopf. 240 pages. $25.95
ISBN 978-1-101-87596-4

To interview the author, contact:
Emily Reardon | 212-572-2018 | ereardon@penguinrandomhouse.com


From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman’s attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.

Stray By Stephanie

After selling her first novel–a dream she’d worked long and hard for–Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she’d left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she’s pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn’t totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it’s possible to change the course of her history.

Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don’t have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it’s like to let go of one’s parents in order to find a peace–and family–of one’s own.

Stray By Stephanie Danler

If you liked the read, vote for Stray for the May LibraryReads list by 4/1!





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