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WORK TITLE: SEA WIFE
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CITY: Amherst
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 256
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=456179 http://www.freenewspos.com/news/article/a/31303/today/amity-gaige-39-i-39-m-living-the-american-dream-39 http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/3335/40/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 26, 1972, in Charlotte, NC; daughter of Frederick and Austra Gaige; married Timothy Watt; children: Atis (son), Freya (daughter).
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1995; University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Rhode Island, instructor in English, beginning 1999; Mt. Holyoke College, visiting assistant professor, 2006-10; Amherst College, visiting writer, 2010-2016, and 2018-19; Wesleyan University, visiting scholar, 2017-18; Yale University, English Department, New Haven, CT, lecturer, 2016–.
AWARDS:Truman Capote fellowship; Teaching Writing fellowship; Fulbright fellowship; Editor’s Choice for Fiction Book of the Year Awards, ForeWord magazine, for The Folded World; McDowell Colony Fellowship. 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018; Yaddo Colony Fellowship, 2011, 2012; Best Books of 2013 by The New York Times Book
Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus, The Women’s National Book Association, Cosmopolitan, Denver Post, The Buffalo News, East Bay Express, Wisconsin State Journal, The Millions.com, Amazon.com, Bookmarks, and Publisher’s Weekly, all for Schroder; Folio Prize, UK, shortlist, 2014, for Schroder; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2016.
WRITINGS
Author’s works have been published in translation. Contributor to periodicals, including Los Angeles Times, New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine Literary Review, Yale Review, Guardian, Die Welt, Harper’s Bazaar, Slate.com, and One Story.
SIDELIGHTS
Amity Gaige’s debut novel, O My Darling, is, according to Booklist contributor Deborah Donovan, an examination of how the past can abruptly “pilot one’s life in totally unexpected directions.” Past events mar the marriage of Charlotte and Clark; she was adopted as a two-year-old, while he has a mother who suffers from depression. After the mother commits suicide, Clark takes a teaching position in a high school and uses money from her bequest to pay for a house. For a time the couple’s life seems on an even keel, but then either literal or metaphoric ghosts begin haunting Clark, and Charlotte starts feeling trapped.
Donovan and other critics noted the lack of plotting in the novel, but Jennifer Reese, writing in Entertainment Weekly, was willing to forgive that flaw in light of Gaige’s sympathetic characterization and “lovely writing [that] make the novel sparkle.” Similarly, in a Publishers Weekly review, a contributor noted that “Crystalline insights into the nature of love,” coupled with glimmers “of narrative brilliance, enliven a first novel marred only by a sketchy plot.” A critic for Kirkus Reviews also praised the “graceful, bright, modern writing” in Gaige’s first novel.
The Folded World
In The Folded World, Gaige tells the story of Charlie and Alice Shade, an intelligent couple whose marriage is thrown into a downward spiral by a series of events in their lives, the focal point of which is Charlie’s tendency to work himself to exhaustion. A social worker who deals with the mentally disturbed, he finds himself off balance as he becomes overly involved with the problems of a new patient, Opal, who has neither friends nor family members to rely upon for support. Alice, whose own plans to return to school have been put on hold once more due to the birth of her and Charlie’s twin daughters, becomes intrigued by one of her husband’s former clients, a bookseller who appeals to her intellect by tempting her with wonderful books and seems to pay more attention to her than her workaholic husband.
Jeff Turrentine, writing for the New York Times Book Review, dubbed Gaige’s effort a “tightly written and emotionally satisfying novel.” He concluded that “if the novel’s climactic ending seems a little too cinematic … it doesn’t make the moment any less stirring.” Comparing the work to her first novel, a contributor to Kirkus Reviews found it “a more sober and less tidy narrative that offers greater breadth in exchange for sweetness.” Laura van den Berg, writing for the Literary Review, commented that the book “entices one to read with both hunger and patience.”
Schroder
Gaige followed The Folded World with the novel Schroder, published in 2013. The novel takes as its inspiration the story of Clark Rockefeller, the pseudonym of a man who in 2008 kidnapped his daughter in the middle of a custody battle, assumed a fake identity, and conned countless people into giving him money and shelter. Gaige’s protagonist is Eric Kennedy, who as a child changed his name from Erik Schroder after escaping from East Germany with his father. As a man, he loses his grip on reality and absconds with his daughter, Meadow, taking her on an extended tour of New England. In relating their misadventures, Gaige explores Kennedy’s curious mind.
“Gaige is such a masterful writer that she makes Schroder seem more pitiful than hateful,” wrote Carmela Ciuraru in USA Today Online. “His vulnerability is heartbreaking, as are the fleeting moments of tenderness between him and Meadow. As unlikely as it sounds, you’ll be half-rooting for this lost soul to prevail.” Noting that drawing on a popular real-life story somewhat lessens the novel’s originality, New York Times contributor Jonathan Dee stated: “It is no knock on the abundant talents of Gaige—who writes gorgeously, who imagines sympathetically—to say that what distinguishes this novel’s genetic material from that of the … television movie [about Clark Rockefeller] is not a simple thing to put one’s finger on.” Despite some quibbles with plot and characterization, a Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that “overall the storytelling is remarkably poised. Smart, comic, unsettling, yet strangely of a piece—not unlike its disarming lead character.”
(open new) Sea Wife
In her 2020 novel, Sea Wife, Gaige serves up a literary page-turner about a young family who want to escape their suburban life in Connecticut for a time. They set off on a yearlong sailing trip with vastly unexpected results. Michael is fed up with his job, and his wife, Juliet, is desperately trying to manage both motherhood and work on a dissertation that is going nowhere. They have two children: Sybil, who is seven, and George who is two. One day Michael tells Juliet that he wants to quit his job and buy a sailboat for the family to have a real adventure. With Juliet in agreement, the family sets off for Panama to pick up their forty-four-foot sailboat, and initially, this escape from suburbia has wonderful results. Michael and Juliet have a renewed commitment to each other, the children are loving life at sea, and soon the family become fairly accomplished sailors. However, after a time, the cramped quarters aboard ship take a toll on the marriage, and Juliet and Michael argue over her depression and politics. Ultimately, Michael dies of dengue fever, and Juliet and her children return to Connecticut. The tale is told in retrospect via Juliet’s first-person narration and through the ship log that Michael kept, and these versions jar with one another at several points. Then, when police arrive to question Juliet over a missing person to whom Michael owed money, the story takes a turn in a more sinister direction.
A Kirkus Reviews critic had a positive assessment of Sea Wife, terming it a “powerful if sometimes wayward take on a marriage on the rocks.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer lauded Sea Wife, noting: “Gaige balances the piecemeal explanations of Michael’s involvement with a profound depiction of the weight of depression and the pains of a complicated relationship. Every element of this impressive novel clicks into a dazzling, heartbreaking whole.” Likewise, Booklist contributor Bridget Thoreson thought “this surprising novel is stunning and deep.” (close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2004, Deborah Donovan, review of O My Darling, p. 1264; November 1, 2012, Kerri Price, review of Schroder, p. 25; January 1, 2020, Bridget Thoreson, review of Sea Wife, p. 39.
Entertainment Weekly, May 13, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of O My Darling, p. 95.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2005, review of O My Darling, p. 70; February 15, 2007, review of The Folded World; March 15, 2020, review of Sea Wife.
Literary Review, summer, 2007, Laura van den Berg, review of The Folded World, p. 260.
New York Times, August 5, 2007, Jeff Turrentine, review of The Folded World; March 3, 2013, Jonathan Dee, review of The Folded World, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, February 28, 2005, review of O My Darling, p. 40; October 22, 2012, review of Schroder, p. 32; January 13, 2020, review of Sea Wife, p. 32.
ONLINE
Amity Gaige website, http:// www.amitygaige.com (April 13, 2020).
BookBrowse, http:// www.bookbrowse.com/ (April 10, 2013), interview with Gaige.
Department of English, Yale University website, https://english.yale.edu/ (April 13, 2020), “Amity Gaige.”
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (April 13, 2020), “Amity Gaige.”
New York Times Arts Beat Blog, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/ (February 6, 2013), John Williams, interview with Gaige.
University of Rhode Island website, http://www.uri.edu/ (July 7, 2005), “Amity Gaige.”
USA Today Online, http:// books.usatoday.com/ (February 15, 2013), Carmela Ciuraru, review of Schroder. *
AMITY GAIGE is the author of four novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and the forthcoming Sea Wife (Knopf, April 2020).
Amity is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, and fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. Her previous novel Schroder has been translated into eighteen languages, and was shortlisted for The Folio Prize in the UK in 2014 and for L’Express Reader’s Prize in France. Schroder was named one of Best Books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus, Cosmopolitan, and Publisher’s Weekly, among many others.
The longtime Visiting Writer at Amherst College, she now teaches creative writing at Yale. Her short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Die Welt, Harper’s Bazaar, The Yale Review, Slate.com, One Story, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has appeared at numerous conferences, festivals, and on radio shows such as NPR.
She currently lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut. She had to learn to sail in order to write Sea Wife. She learned that she is not a gifted sailor, so she will stick to writing about it.
Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling (2005), The Folded World (2007), and Schroder, which is forthcoming from Twelve Books/Hachette in February 2013. In 2013, Schroder will also be published internationally in fourteen languages.
Amity was the recipient of the Foreword Book of the Year Award for 2007, and in 2006, she was recognized as one of the 5 Under 35 outstanding emerging writers by the National Book Foundation. Amity is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and a Baltic Writing Residency. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, O Magazine, the Literary Review, The Yale Review, One Story, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is the current Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
New Books
April 2020
(hardback)
Sea Wife
Novels
O My Darling (2005)
The Folded World (2007)
Schroder (2013)
Sea Wife (2020)
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Collections
We Are a Thunderstorm (poems) (1990)
Amity Gaige
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Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige and Adam Haslett in Conversation at Greenlight Bookstore - February 28, 2013
Amity Gaige and Adam Haslett in Conversation at Greenlight Bookstore - February 28, 2013
Born 1972
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
Alma mater Brown University;
Iowa Writers' Workshop
Genre Novel
Notable awards 5 Under 35 Honoree
Spouse Tim Watt
Amity Gaige (born 1972) is an American novelist, known for her books O My Darling, The Folded World and Schroder. In 2006 the National Book Foundation named her a 5 under 35 honoree.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Awards and honors
4 References
Early life
Amity Gaige was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, to an academic father and a psychologist mother. The Gaige family moved several times before settling in Reading, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Brown University, where she studied English and theater. She later obtained an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1999).[citation needed][1]
Career
Her first novel, O My Darling (Other Press, 2005)[2] won her a place in the inaugural year of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Awards.[3]
Her second novel, The Folded World, was published in 2007 (Other Press, Random House),[4] and garnered independent publishing awards that year.[5][6]
Her third novel, Schroder (Twelve Books, 2013)[7] was a shortlist nominee for Britain's inaugural GB£40,000 Folio Prize in 2014. The novel stirred controversy in its depiction of a reckless young father who flees with his six-year-old daughter on a road trip through New England after a custody battle. The author drew inspiration from the real-life Christian Gerhartsreiter story, though the book is not a novelization of that story. In style and form, Schroder drew comparison to works by Nabokov.[8][9] The Los Angeles Times wrote, "Schroder’s closest literary relative is probably Lolita (minus the pedophilia),"[10] and Kathryn Schulz suggested that Gaige intended Schroder as an homage and an "appropriation" of Lolita in New York Magazine, which published a scratched-out image of Nabokov's cover art.[11] Gaige also cited Pale Fire as an influence in an interview with The New York Times' John Williams.[12] The book was sold pre-publication for translation into fifteen languages, and was endorsed on the Dutch television show De Wereld Draait Door,[13] sending the book into numerous reprintings. In the U.S., the book won endorsements from Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan,[14] and was reviewed in nearly every major print outlet, making it one of the most heavily reviewed books of the year.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21] According to WorldCat, the book is held in 3,873 libraries, with editions in 8 languages.[22]
Awards and honors
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
2014 Folio Prize shortlist for Schroder[23][24]
Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige's picture
Lecturer in English
M.F.A., The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, 1999
B.A., Brown University, 1995
amitygaige.com
Amity Gaige is the author of four novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and the forthcoming Sea Wife (Knopf, 2020). Since its publication, Schroder has been translated into eighteen languages, and was shortlisted for UK’s The Folio Prize in 2014 and for L’Express Reader’s Prize in France. Schroder was named one of Best Books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus, Cosmopolitan, Denver Post, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Gaige is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, a Baltic Writing Residency, and in 2006, she was recognized as one of the “5 Under 35” outstanding emerging writers by the National Book Foundation. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction.
Gaige is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has lectured widely, and has taught creative writing at Mount Holyoke College, Wesleyan, and Amherst College. Her short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Die Welt, Harper’s Bazaar, The Yale Review, Slate.com, One Story, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently lives outside of Hartford, Connecticut.
Amity is pleased to be teaching Intermediate Fiction at Yale in the Fall of 2019.
CV: https://english.yale.edu/sites/default/files/gaige_amity_-_cv19.pdf
Gaige, Amity SEA WIFE Knopf (Fiction None) $26.95 5, 19 ISBN: 978-0-525-65649-4
A family sailing excursion goes badly awry in a perfect storm of weather, naiveté, and marital tension.
Michael Partlow feels trapped in a dull job and wants an adventure; his wife, Juliet, is a stay-at-home mother of two who’s prone to depression. (Her malaise is exacerbated by her having to abandon her dissertation on the poet Anne Sexton, another depressive mom.) In an impulsive moment, Michael decides to purchase a small yacht (which he renames Juliet) and brings the family down to Panama to sail it to Cartagena, Colombia. We know early that something went wrong on the trip: Juliet notes that their house is “a point of interest,” Michael is absent, and she’s taken to retreating to a closet. As Gaige parcels out details of the calamity, she frames Michael and Juliet’s story as he said, -she said dueling narratives: Juliet’s present-day narration of the trip's aftermath alternates with entries from Michael’s logbook. The parrying reveals how sometimes even the closest couples fail to understand each other: Michael is prone to mocking Juliet’s sensitivity (“Tears, a husband’s kryptonite”) while Juliet only had the slightest sense of his internal seething, which intertwines grumpy political grievances with escalating contempt for his marriage. Gaige is well-suited for this sort of psychological exploration: Her previous novel, Schroder (2013), smartly chronicled the irrationality that can consume a marital split. And the seafaring sections are gripping, as the family’s lives are literally tempest-tossed. Yet the novel is also a ship carrying a lot of ballast, as Gaige sometimes strains to keep the couple’s parrying going: spats, riffs on parenting, literary analysis, and a late-breaking murder mystery that feels tacked-on. None of which sinks the story, but it does dampen its power.
A powerful if sometimes wayward take on a marriage on the rocks.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Gaige, Amity: SEA WIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617193016/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89cdaea6. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
Sea Wife
Amity Gaige. Knopf, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-525-65649-4
A marriage implodes and a husband dies due to the strain of a year sailing around the Caribbean, in Gaige's splendid, wrenching novel (after Schroder). Michael Partlow, an unfulfilled businessman lured by visions of heroic self-sufficiency and idealized memories of his late father, proposes that he and his wife, Juliet--a stalled-out poetry PhD candidate and stay-at home mother--buy a boat, leave Connecticut, and spend a year sailing with their two young children. Despite Juliet's misgivings and worries, she agrees and the family enters a new wandering lifestyle with moments of joy amid frightening storms, privations, and mounting financial costs. Eventually, the cramped life onboard drives Juliet and Michael into arguments fueled by Juliet's depression and Michael's support or President Trump, and Michael ends up dead from dengue fever. Five months after the end of the voyage, Juliet is mired in a deep depression and gains insight into her marriage by reading Michael's journal, and the story takes a frantic turn when police arrive with questions about a missing person Michael owed money to. Gaige balances the piecemeal explanations of Michael's involvement with a profound depiction of the weight of depression and the pains of a complicated relationship. Every element of this impressive novel clicks into a dazzling, heartbreaking whole. Agent: Kim Witherspoim. InkWell Management. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Sea Wife." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 2, 13 Jan. 2020, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A612368937/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f71a6a4. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.
Sea Wife. By Amity Gaige. Mar. 2020. 280p. Knopf, $26.95 (97805256564941.
Juliet resisted her husband Michael's idea that they could leave their life in Connecticut to set out on a sea voyage with their two children. Just about everyone he told about it had some sort of criticism. Their marriage was rocky as it was, and, with a seven-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, people found plenty of reasons why it was a bad idea. But, eventually, Juliet relents; Michael finds a boat; and they set off in pursuit of his dream. Told from Juliet's perspective after the voyage, shattered and spending most days in a closet while her mother handles the children and household, and interwoven with Michael's often-rhapsodic, at times confessional captain's log entries, Sea Wife gives a multilayered perspective on the ill-fated voyage. From the challenges of two people finding themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum to Juliet's depression, which leads her to give up on her dissertation, and the challenges of life at sea, this surprising novel is stunning and deep.--Bridget Thoreson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Thoreson, Bridget. "Sea Wife." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2020, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613202896/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cab3f6b. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.