Starred review from January 27, 2020
In this intimate memoir, Wizenberg (A Homemade Life) shares the story of her changing sexual orientation, the dissolution of her marriage, and the challenges of coming out to her friends and family. While serving on a jury as a 36-year-old married mother of a toddler, Wizenberg became captivated by a female attorney she met. Soon after the trial, she shared her newfound feelings and confusion with her chef and restaurant owner husband, Brandon, who responded with a mix of kindness and fear. Just as “astronomers know that every star is in motion and that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties,” Wizenberg writes, she realized she needed to let go of rigid definitions about identity and face the challenges of navigating the complexities of love. Throughout, she integrates observations from well-known researchers, in particular the work of Lisa Diamond, who found that the norm among women “was not stability in sexual attraction and identity but change.” Wizenberg writes with a remarkable openness about being true to herself and to others, and gives those looking to understand the complicated issue of sexuality a compassionate example of the many forms that love takes. This honest and moving memoir will enlighten and educate those seeking to understand their true selves.
Starred review from February 1, 2020
When food writer Wizenberg (A Homemade Life) reports for jury duty, she is surprised to find herself attracted to the female defense attorney. Even though she has been married to her husband for a decade and they have a toddler at home, she can't shake the thought of this woman. What follows is an intimate account of how this chance encounter upended her marriage and set in motion a new direction for her life and for her family. Drawing on the work of queer writers, including Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson, Wizenberg's beautifully written memoir explores what it's like to come out even while continuing to question one's identity and sexual orientation. The book tackles these complicated themes and the meaning of family with compassion and tenderness. VERDICT An essential addition that will resonate with fans of Wizenberg's earlier memoirs and anyone probing the complicated ways that sexuality and traditional family life overlap or diverge.--Erin Shea, Ferguson Lib., CT
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 15, 2020
A bestselling memoirist's account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity. When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men's suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day's proceedings. But guilt at being "a woman wearing a wedding ring" made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the "stars" that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where "nothing happened." Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed "stone top" who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg's book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman's hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference. A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.
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April 1, 2020
In her third memoir, Wizenberg (Delancey, 2014) shares a journey of exploration and acceptance of her own sexual fluidity. Serving on a jury in her mid-thirties, she realized she had a deep crush on one of the defense attorneys, Nora. This was indeed a complication, as Wizenberg was married to her husband, Brandon, with whom she was raising their daughter. Wizenberg takes readers through her childhood, growing up in upper-middle-class Oklahoma City, introducing along the way her open-minded parents and her gay uncle Terry, and her early impressions of the AIDS epidemic. In 2005, she met Brandon through a friend who had told him about her food blog, and they began a cross-country romance and soon married. While Wizenberg works on her writing, Brandon dreams of becoming a restaurant owner and eventually does. Wizenberg recounts attempts at an open relationship and the realization that she is attracted to people of many genders. This is a spirited, terrifyingly courageous, and searingly honest memoir of discovering sexual identity and strength.WOMEN FOCUS(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)