In these nine pieces, Beard investigates love and betrayal, grief and survival in the precise, searingly personal language for which she is beloved. These genre-defying works capture both the quietly luminous moments of daily existence and those of life-and-death decision, showing a pioneering author at the pinnacle of her talent.
Beard's first book, The Boys of My Youth, is a collection of exquisitely autobiographical essays that have the arc and thrust of good fiction. She portrays herself as wary of the world, someone who looks up at the night sky and worries that the "moon is looking at me funny." Beard's high-wire trick is that despite her grievous subject matter, she hangs on to her squinty, skinny-girl-on-the-sidelines sense of humor and never lapses into mawkishness.
The fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She flies under the radar—a sidekick, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed, and character is forged. In time, their friendship is tested—by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them, and by the first, startling, subversive intimations of womanhood. With dry wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders, and that within the souls of the overlooked often burns something radiant.
