Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this โprofoundโ (Publishers Weekly, starred review) new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for grantedโbetween ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artworkโwhich turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.
Described as โa 21st-century Virginia Woolfโ in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontรซ, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymathโs journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.
This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.