News
January 15, 2015
Review from The Rumpas
Review from The Rumpas
Reviewed By David Weinstein
We live in an age when memoirs too often resemble a magician’s act: they dazzle us with costume changes, stripping away layer after layer as we wait in vain to behold the nakedness underneath. Surrendering Oz, to our good fortune, is nothing like this.
Bonnie Friedman’s essays actually reveal her vulnerability. She does not divert attention from the difficult stories, which include an extramarital affair and her sister’s decline from multiple sclerosis. Friedman, a writer and professor at the University of North Texas, traces her life in fourteen essays. The collection begins with the author as a young, mystified girl in the Bronx, and it ends with her as an adult in Texas. We lurch back and forth along the way, pendulumlike, just like Friedman as she is growing up.
A central theme, after all, is her ambivalence. Dominating her childhood is “the sort of dubiousness that makes a student shoot her hand up in class, but then, quite slowly, lower it, and afterward trail home unsettled, head bent.” This unshakable self-doubt, familiar to so many of us, follows Friedman to adulthood and inspires her title essay, “Surrendering Oz.” She describes Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as a kindred spirit since both escape to fantasy in their most trying moments. Hence Friedman’s quest, in life, to surrender this meek version of herself—to surrender Oz.
Friedman’s prose confirms her success, for it is anything but meek.
Read the complete review
We live in an age when memoirs too often resemble a magician’s act: they dazzle us with costume changes, stripping away layer after layer as we wait in vain to behold the nakedness underneath. Surrendering Oz, to our good fortune, is nothing like this.
Bonnie Friedman’s essays actually reveal her vulnerability. She does not divert attention from the difficult stories, which include an extramarital affair and her sister’s decline from multiple sclerosis. Friedman, a writer and professor at the University of North Texas, traces her life in fourteen essays. The collection begins with the author as a young, mystified girl in the Bronx, and it ends with her as an adult in Texas. We lurch back and forth along the way, pendulumlike, just like Friedman as she is growing up.
A central theme, after all, is her ambivalence. Dominating her childhood is “the sort of dubiousness that makes a student shoot her hand up in class, but then, quite slowly, lower it, and afterward trail home unsettled, head bent.” This unshakable self-doubt, familiar to so many of us, follows Friedman to adulthood and inspires her title essay, “Surrendering Oz.” She describes Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as a kindred spirit since both escape to fantasy in their most trying moments. Hence Friedman’s quest, in life, to surrender this meek version of herself—to surrender Oz.
Friedman’s prose confirms her success, for it is anything but meek.
Read the complete review
November 26, 2014
Review from Image Journal
Review from Image Journal
Surrendering Oz, a memoir of linked essays by New York writer Bonnie Friedman, is the kind of memoir that peels back layers from the reader's own life in the reading. Vivid in metaphor and imagery and incisive in her self-discoveries, Friedman's book serves as both literary banquet and a source of rich emotional wisdom.
Writer Abigail Thomas said "Every woman who can read should read this book," and while that may seem like overselling, Friedman deftly dissects issues of identity and voice (particular, perhaps, to being female in American culture) that are rarely articulated with such grace and logic. Beginning with her childhood as a "bookish girl in the Bronx," she untangles the influence of her charismatic sister, Anita; her parents, one a believer and one a skeptic; and her sense of her femaleness as “something mortifying.”
Friedman describes Surrendering Oz as being about "learning how to think for oneself, how to gain possession over one's own life,” and in her essay "Coming of Age in Book Country" she recalls how she, as a young woman, was "unable to draw conclusions about anything, living as if my mind were a door I must hold open for yet more information, as if, if I were to come to a conclusion too soon, I would miss the crucial valence of things, the particular nuance that provided the key."
As her life unfolds, she learns to trust in the reality of her own selfhood, though her tendency to question and observe and search for more is a driving force in a collection of essays that spans from her childhood to present life. This is a special book: if you’re a woman or an artist or know someone who is, pick up a copy, and let Friedman’s journey shed light on your own.
Writer Abigail Thomas said "Every woman who can read should read this book," and while that may seem like overselling, Friedman deftly dissects issues of identity and voice (particular, perhaps, to being female in American culture) that are rarely articulated with such grace and logic. Beginning with her childhood as a "bookish girl in the Bronx," she untangles the influence of her charismatic sister, Anita; her parents, one a believer and one a skeptic; and her sense of her femaleness as “something mortifying.”
Friedman describes Surrendering Oz as being about "learning how to think for oneself, how to gain possession over one's own life,” and in her essay "Coming of Age in Book Country" she recalls how she, as a young woman, was "unable to draw conclusions about anything, living as if my mind were a door I must hold open for yet more information, as if, if I were to come to a conclusion too soon, I would miss the crucial valence of things, the particular nuance that provided the key."
As her life unfolds, she learns to trust in the reality of her own selfhood, though her tendency to question and observe and search for more is a driving force in a collection of essays that spans from her childhood to present life. This is a special book: if you’re a woman or an artist or know someone who is, pick up a copy, and let Friedman’s journey shed light on your own.
November 11, 2014
The following excerpt from Surrendering Oz was published in Tablet Magazine:
The following excerpt from Surrendering Oz was published in Tablet Magazine:
October 22, 2014
Taken together, the pieces by Bonnie Friedman in Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays, just out from Etruscan Press, form an autobiography of sorts, one in which we follow the progress of a shy, bookish Jewish girl as she slowly but surely comes into her own. From the Bronx bedroom she shares with her older sister to the thoroughfares and cities of the wider world, we watch as the girl grows and gains confidence, both as a writer, and as a woman. The essays that chart her growth—she’s now in 56—have an internal sequence all their own, determined by their emotional valence, not the calendar. Dorothy from Kansas and Gertrude Stein, Victoria’s Secret and bedbugs—in Friedman’s skilled hands, the quotidian stuff and mess of the world come together in a benign—and even divine—order. Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough asked Friedman about the singular faith that infuses every single page of this indelible book:
YZM: Did you write these essays with the goal of gathering them into a book? Or did their coming together in a single volume happen after they had been written?
BF: I wrote these essays over many years, always in the grips of a presiding passion —
READ MORE
YZM: Did you write these essays with the goal of gathering them into a book? Or did their coming together in a single volume happen after they had been written?
BF: I wrote these essays over many years, always in the grips of a presiding passion —
READ MORE