Contact me to purchase Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home.
“The strings of a violin have to be held in place on both ends, and the two poles of Elizabeth Mosier’s book are memory (as archaeology) and forgetting (in the very moving passages about the author’s mother and her descent into the blankness of Alzheimer’s). The music of this book is very fine indeed, and its passion is for the preservation of objects, moments, persons, and places that Elizabeth Mosier has loved. In its clear-sighted lyric eloquence, this book is unforgettable.”– Charles Baxter
Purchase My Life as a Girl here
“First-novelist Mosier authors a sharp-edged romance about an Arizona native hoping to reinvent herself when she goes “back East” to college. Entering Bryn Mawr, Jaime Cody wants to bury her recent past: the arrest of her father for embezzlement, her degrading waitress jobs and her fling with Buddy the “cowboy.” All goes well until Buddy arrives on campus, “hell bent” on bringing her home. At this point, readers are taken back in time as Jaime recounts her last summer “as a girl,” when she skirts the fate she used to joke about with her best friend, Rosa: “hitched to some loser guy right out of high school, cramped into a trailer in Happy Tepee RV Park, selling fry bread with beans at the mall, drinking beer at desert parties.” Mosier cleanly slices Jaime’s life into three phases: her upper-middle-class childhood; her traumatic adolescence, when financial security slips away as quickly as her trust in her father; and her emergence into adulthood, when she can view her own mistakes and her parents’ mistakes objectively. Featuring lifelike dialogue, three-dimensional characters and an upbeat outcome, the novel also serves up glossy, attention-getting prose (“That was the beginning, as blind and misguided as most beginnings are”) that will appeal to female teens not quite ready to bid their own “girlhoods” good-bye.” – Publishers Weekly