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WORK TITLE: Strange Beauty
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.elizafactor.net/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2012054889
LC classification: PS3606.A255
Personal name heading:
Factor, Eliza
Found in: The mercury fountain, c2012: t.p. (Eliza Factor)
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Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and entrepreneur. Extreme Kids & Crew, New York, NY, cofounder and president, 2011–.
WRITINGS
Author of the Broken and Woken blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Eliza Factor is a writer and entrepreneur. She is the cofounder of the nonprofit sensory gym Extreme Kids & Crew in New York City, an initiative designed to assist families who have children with disabilities. In 2012 Factor was named “New Yorker of the Week” by NY1 for her work with Extreme Kids & Crew.
The Mercury Fountain
Factor published The Mercury Fountain in 2012. Set in the American outpost of Pristina in rural Chihuahua in the early 1900s, the story follows the ups and downs of the lives of town founder Owen Scraperton and his family, liberal wife Dolores and stubborn daughter Victoria. Owen fails to convince the government to extend a rail line to their settlement. After Victoria’s is permanently disfigured in an accident, the fortune of the town deteriorates rapidly.
Booklist contributor Diego Baez pointed out that Victoria’s “forked tongue is another item in Factor’s well-crafted set of symbols.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Floyd Skloot summarized that “this is the mind of madness. Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine “la mina de los muertos,” the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail. “The Mercury Fountain shows this with terrible clarity and purpose.” Reviewing the novel on the Pank website, Lynne Weiss said that she appreciated Factor’s “portrayal of a long but not always happy marriage.” Weiss appended: “What I admired the most was the structure of the novel. The story covers a span of twenty-three years, but like Mercury or mercury, it coalesces and moves through time, carrying us to each pool of crisis, tension, and change and providing with quick strokes– all the background we need to understand where we are in the story and what has happened in the intervening years, portraying a world that is fascinating and yet doomed.”
Love Maps
In 2015 Factor published Love Maps. Artist and educator Sarah Marker panics after she receives a letter from her long estranged husband, Philip. Having never told him about their now-seven-year-old son, she decides that the best approach would be to leave their house and drive. She loves him but cannot forgive her for abandoning her. As she travels, she attempts to piece together a string of failed relationships and experiences in her life an those around her.
Writing in Xpress Reviews, Samantha Gust opined that the novel “paints a poignant picture of familial and romantic love and their complexities, but the canvas is wrinkled.” Reviewing the novel on the Coal Hill Review website, Elizabeth Bingler commented that “Sarah’s parents were intriguing characters in Love Maps, but we learned little about them other than that they were adventurous, secretive, and died in a plane crash. It seems that Factor has left us the best for last: her third novel promises to be much more ambitious, and even more entertaining than her first two novels—after all, she has been mulling over its contents for more than twenty years.”
Strange Beauty
Factor published the memoir Strange Beauty: A Portrait of My Son in 2017. In it she shares her experiences raising her son Felix, who has autism and a number of other physical disabilities. She traces Felix’s once benevolent demeanor to that of nonverbal, self-harming fits. She also talks about her vision for the sensory gym Extreme Kids & Crew to aid in Felix’s socializing.
Booklist contributor Stacy Shaw remarked that “in a conversational, well-phrased style, Factor relays a positive outlook and hopefulness at every setback that are truly inspirational.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that “throughout, readers gain a sense of the complexity of Felix.” The same reviewer called Strange Beauty “a frank, compassionate, and highly detailed account of the roller-coaster ride of caring for a disabled, autistic child.” A Publishers Weekly contributor found Strange Beauty to be a “moving and insightful memoir.” The Publishers Weekly contributor reasoned that “this passionate story of a mother’s quest to help her child will resonate with many readers.” In a review in the Mom Egg Review website, Michelle Everett Wilbert claimed that this “honest, compelling” memoir is also “thoughtful.” Wilbert suggested that “parents of children with disabilities will find it a testament to love and commitment as well as a needed narrative of intimate commiseration. The book has its strongest potential, perhaps, in serving as a catalyst for deeper sharing and understanding while providing a blueprint for changing attitudes about disability through the simple, time-honored and human need for storytelling–allowing others inside the ‘Strange Beauty’ of life with an extraordinary child.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Factor, Eliza, Strange Beauty: A Portrait of My Son, Parallax Press (Berkeley, CA), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2012, Diego Baez, review of The Mercury Fountain, p. 39; August 1, 2017, Stacy Shaw, review of Strange Beauty, p. 15.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Strange Beauty.
New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2012, Floyd Skloot, review of Mercury Fountain, p. 17.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of Strange Beauty, p. 57.
Xpress Reviews, May 8, 2015, Samantha Gust, review of Love Maps.
ONLINE
Coal Hill Review, http://www.coalhillreview.com/ (August 17, 2015), Elizabeth Bingler, review of Love Maps.
Eliza Factor Website, https://www.elizafactor.net (April 8, 2018).
Mom Egg Review, http://momeggreview.com/ (September 3, 2017), Michelle Everett Wilbert, review of Strange Beauty.
Pank, https://pankmagazine.com/ (November 20, 2012), Lynne Weiss, review of Mercury Fountain.
Seleni, https://www.seleni.org/ (April 8, 2018), Eliza Factor, “The Epiphany of My Son’s Disability.”
I am a writer and the founder of Extreme Kids & Crew, a nonprofit community center that connects families raising children with disabilities through the arts and play. I live in Brooklyn, New York and Dublin, New Hampshire with my husband and three children, along with various friends and animals. I enjoy meeting other writers and readers, lovers of trees, people who live beyond language, and those who cartwheel down corporate corridors when no one is looking.
Extreme Kids & Crew
My son Felix was born with multiple disabilities, including autism and cerebral palsy; my daughters were not. I yearned for a creative space outside of our home where each of my children would feel equally welcome and at ease. I also wanted to meet other parents who knew firsthand the pain and strange beauty of raising and loving a child with disabilities. Did they feel a similar stress and isolation?
This yearning turned into Extreme Kids & Crew, a nonprofit that I started with some friends in 2011. Extreme Kids & Crew is dedicated to creating and maintaining beautiful spaces where families raising children with disabilities can meet, express themselves through the arts and movement, relax, and simply be. The program has grown quickly, serving over 1100 families in its first five years of operations. We currently run two universally designed play spaces in Brooklyn and Queens that attract families from every borough in New York City.
Extreme Kids & Crew is unique in that it focuses not only on the child with disabilities but also on the parents and typically developing siblings. Participating families bring in children with a vast range of disabilities–autism spectrum disorders, sensory processing disorders, ADHD, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, blindness, deafness, learning disabilities, epilepsy, and more. What ties these families together is not the diagnosis of one its members, but the experience of being a different kind of family. Programs are pay-what-you-can so that all of these different families may take part, regardless of income. The atmosphere created by families bound together through love and disability is unusual, invigorating and thought provoking. It is the energy, hope and care generated by these families that makes the program great.
In my role as Founder and the President of the Board, I am always happy to talk about our work and what we’ve learned over the years, and I’m often looking for board members. Interested parties can contact me at elizafactor@extremekidsandcrew.org
Broken and Woken
Broken and Woken is a blog I started for Extreme Kids & Crew that interwove personal commentary and interviews with people I met in the disability world. It now features posts from people around the country, which makes me happy as Extreme Kids & Crew is a platform to raise all of our voices, not just mine. We welcome anyone involved in disability to submit their writing, art, interviews. One of my first posts, from May 2014, set out what Broken and Woken meant to me. What do these words mean to you? Let us know! Directions for submissions are on the blog.
Eliza Factor
Eliza Factor
Eliza Factor is author of the acclaimed novels The Mercury Fountain and Love Maps. Eliza and her husband have three children, the eldest of whom is multiply disabled. She is founder and President of the Board of Extreme Kids & Crew, a non profit community center that connects families with children with disabilities through the arts, music and play in Brooklyn. Factor was named New Yorker of the Week by NY1 in 2012 for creating the city's first drop in sensory playspace for children with disabilities. Eliza Factor lives in Brooklyn with her family.
The Epiphany of My Son’s Disability
I knew we would love him – I just didn't expect the world to do the same
by Eliza Factor
When I was 4 months pregnant with my son Felix, I contracted the chicken pox. The doctors told me that if you have to get the chicken pox when you're pregnant, the second trimester is the time to get it. There was only a 1:1000 chance that the virus would permeate the placenta and harm him. So I told everyone not to worry.
But then Felix stopped kicking. For a long time, he didn't move at all. Then he started to swoosh. It felt a bit like an aquatic creature was living inside me. I wrote this poem:
If you were a squid,
We could get rid of the baby clothes
And wooden blocks.
We'd put you in a sea chest
Glassy, sadly square, but filled with the best in pebbles and shells.
We'd watch, noses smushed,
Landlubbing bugs with big eyes and tentacled fingers,
Asking each other: Do you think it's happy?
What would it like to eat?
It wouldn't be that bad,
Except for the neighbors,
The snuffling relatives,
The asinine commentary.
And what, pray tell, is wrong with a squid?
My spittle spotting the sidewalk.
Passersby would shudder or smugly pity.
But when they were gone,
We'd have fun, swirling the water and wondering.
As I recovered and Felix began to swoosh more vigorously, I forgot about the poem. But a few months after he was born, when Jason and I began to notice that our baby was floppier than other babies, I remembered it. Felix's muscle tone was so low that he could barely lift his head. He did loll about in a squid-like fashion.
I thought, "Oh, my god!" Had I known? Had I sensed his muscular abilities leaking away? Although science doesn't have an exact answer for us, that seems to be what happened. The virus significantly altered the architecture of his brain, leaving him severely disabled, physically and intellectually.
The poem foretold other things, too: Felix did attract asinine commentary. I can't tell you the number of times strangers advised me to give Felix a nap, assuming his floppiness resulted from exhaustion, rather than his inability to sit up in a stroller. And Jason and I did have fun, when we were alone with him, swirling the water and wondering.
The poem speaks to the safety and pleasure of a home where you are loved and accepted as you are. I grew up in a home like that. I knew what it felt like. And I knew that Jason and I could make a home like that for Felix. But as he grew older, home was not enough. From the moment he could move himself around with a walker, he wheeled it over to the front door and banged it against the woodwork. He wanted to explore the bigger world.
So we did. Sometimes this meant Felix wheeling his walker down the sidewalk. But he couldn't keep it up for more than a block or two. So most of the time, Jason, a babysitter, or I pushed Felix in his stroller, his folded-up walker dangling from the handlebars, for miles and miles around Brooklyn and Manhattan.
We had plenty of encounters of the sort in my poem: nervous shuddering, smug pitying, strangled looks of alarm. I had expected that sort of thing and barely noticed after a while. What I didn't expect were the people whose eyes lit up when they saw us, who broke into grins or more contained nods of recognition. Not loads of people, but a far greater number than those who usually acknowledged me when I walked around the city alone or in the company of my able-bodied daughters.
There was the elderly panhandler in Brooklyn Heights who blessed Felix as he tucked a five-dollar bill in his stroller. The busload of passengers who applauded Felix the first time he rolled onto a city bus wheelchair lift. And that man on Park Avenue. I had just picked up Felix from school, and he was in a terrible state. I did not know what was wrong. It could have been heat, hunger, thirst, or frustration. It could have been something else entirely. Felix rarely uses words, so there is much about him that I do not and cannot know. But he makes his emotions clear.
At that moment, he was screaming louder than the accumulated honking of all the taxis in New York City and hitting his face with merciless passion. All my attention was focused on getting us to our car. I felt an instinctual need to shield him from the public when he got like that. I pushed his stroller with my body, while holding his wrists in an attempt to restrain him. But we had to stop for a red light. Beside us a young Asian guy in a business suit nodded in commiseration (with Felix, not me) and said, "I feel just like you."
Sometimes it sucked walking Felix around. We'd go somewhere in the subway, then get trapped underground because the elevator was broken. We met with all sorts of indignities, injustices, and messes. But those encounters with other people, no matter how fleeting, buoyed me. Felix was acknowledged, kindly. I was also acknowledged as an equal, often by people with lives that were far more difficult than mine.
What I could not have understood when I wrote that poem was that living with Felix would change my view of what people can do and how we can be with each other. As much as the strangeness and difficulties of Felix's life could isolate us from mainstream culture, he also led me to a marvelously unpredictable collection of people, most of whose names I would never learn but who nonetheless marked me, ignited me, held me up. Little was ever said. Mostly these were chance encounters, a glance, or a smile. But their impact went straight to my soul. It made me feel that I was not alone – that it wasn't just me and Jason, swirling the water and wondering. There were other people swirling the water too.
We are all so much more than what is obvious to everyone else – our class and race, our size and sex, our abilities and disabilities. We have so much potential to connect beyond these boundaries, and when those genuine connections happen, they are immensely powerful. That's what those walks with Felix really drummed into me.
It got me wondering whether it would be possible to design a space that would get those zaps of connection happening more frequently and predictably, so I started Extreme Kids & Crew, an arts and play-based community center for families with children who have disabilities. I also wanted to know if Felix's ability to break down racial and cultural barriers could be applied more broadly: Could our children's disabilities be used as a force to bring people from different groups together? I suspected so, but I didn't have any experience other than my walks around New York with Felix.
After five years of directing and overseeing Extreme Kids, I now feel confident answering yes. The interaction between families from all walks of life, the relief at being accepted, and the children's pleasure create an atmosphere that works like a tonic. The experience of mothering Felix and overseeing Extreme Kids & Crew makes me believe that disability can bring out the best in us, and that it has a great, untapped power to bridge cultural and class divides.
We are all touched by disability, whether it's our child's dyslexia, our mother's Alzheimer's, our brother's autism, our sister's war wounds, our friend's car accident, or our own asthma. What if we could let go of the specific cause or diagnosis and see that our bodies and minds are always in flux? And that trying to force a body or mind into fixed contours is a waste of energy doomed to fail?
What if we put our energy toward opening our hearts and taking care of each other instead? This is not liberal thinking or conservative thinking – it's old-fashioned humanistic thinking, and it is alive and well in the disability community, even as it has been drained from general discourse. I amuse myself by imagining Felix running for office and wonder if he might be a better choice than the other candidates. Not because he could or could not govern, but because of that gift I did not foresee when he swooshed in my womb: his ability to bring people together.
A version of this piece was published on the blog Broken and Woken and is reprinted here with permission from the author.
Strange Beauty
Stacy Shaw
Booklist. 113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Strange Beauty. By Eliza Factor. Sept. 2017. 240p. Parallax, paper, $18.95 (9781941529720); e-book, $12.99 (9781941529737). 818.
Factor (The Mercury Fountain, 2012) recounts the story of raising her son, Felix, who has both autism and significant physical disabilities. Though nonverbal, Felix's personality was sweet and affectionate until he began having periodic fits of violence against himself. Though prescription drugs at times alleviated this, Factor wanted more for Felix. Extreme Kids and Crew was born out of Factor's vision of a relaxing sensory gym for those with disabilities and their families, where they would not be judged. Through her efforts, Factor created a place for Felix and others to be accepted and integrated into a larger community. Though Felix's situation eventually necessitated his living at a residential school that could meet his needs 24/7, his unique and continuing imprint on every area of Factor's life and on Extreme Kids is evident in this book. A wonderfully uplifting book about Felix's resilience and the love and community that Factor and her family have created and experienced, this is a must-read for anyone touched by or raising a child with disabilities as well as those in the medical field. In a conversational, well-phrased style, Factor relays a positive outlook and hopefulness at every setback that are truly inspirational.--Stacy Shaw
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shaw, Stacy. "Strange Beauty." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 15. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718702/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1a2d013a. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718702
Factor, Eliza: STRANGE BEAUTY
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Factor, Eliza STRANGE BEAUTY Parallax Press (Adult Nonfiction) $18.95 8, 22 ISBN: 978-1-941529-72-0
Factor (Love Maps, 2015, etc.) chronicles life with her nonverbal son Felix, who is autistic and physically disabled.When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, the author's boyfriend, Jason, was near the buildings. While she waited for news from him, she had the agonizing fear that they might never have a child together, which led them to getting married and pregnant a year later. During her pregnancy, Factor contracted chicken pox, which, though she didn't realize it at the time, hurt her growing fetus. In this honest memoir that vibrates with unconditional love, the author details what life is like with Felix and her other two children. It took many months, numerous visits to doctors and specialists, and endless tests before she found out just how handicapped Felix would be due to his lack of white matter in his brain. Factor adeptly chronicles each step of the process, each moment of triumph when Felix reached a new goal, and the times when she and her husband felt dismay and even shame when he failed to advance like the other toddlers around him. Throughout, readers gain a sense of the complexity of Felix, whether he's happy, responding to music therapy, or engaged in some awful fit that forces him to scream and tear at his own body. Factor also discusses her other two children, who were born without such issues, her battles with the health care and educational systems, and her subsequent founding of the nonprofit community center Extreme Kids & Crew. The author's story demonstrates the need for more quality help for parents of children with disabilities, who will find solace in knowing that others have struggled and found joy in this type of parenting. A frank, compassionate, and highly detailed account of the roller-coaster ride of caring for a disabled, autistic child.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Factor, Eliza: STRANGE BEAUTY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b55a2210. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427710
Strange Beauty: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly. 264.24 (June 12, 2017): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Strange Beauty: A Memoir
Eliza Factor. Parallax, $18.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-941529-72-0
Novelist Factor (The Mercury Fountain) shares her experiences raising a physically disabled child, Felix, in this moving and insightful memoir. Factor and her husband, an attorney, were living in Brooklyn when their first of three children was born. As he grew, they noticed that he was unable to hold himself up like other babies and so began an odyssey of doctor visits, treatments, therapies, scans, and tests, such as the one that revealed Felix had a lack of white brain matter. Felix was diagnosed with a serious disorder called periventricular leukomalacia and eventually with autism as well. Factor felt shame, despair, and loneliness as she confronted the challenges of raising a nonverbal child who cannot walk on his own, yet she was also filled with love for her joyful, exuberant son. As one caregiver noted, "We all think that we do so much for Felix, but he does even more for us." Still, when the sweet-tempered Felix began to rage and injure himself, Factor and her husband began to search for methods to control the behavior, such as acupressure, diet change, and various prescription drugs. In her efforts to aid Felix, Factor is inspired to create the nonprofit Extreme Kids & Crew, a community center where disabled kids socialize and play. Despite the hardships, Factor emphasizes the infinite ways her disabled son enriches and illuminates her life; this passionate story of a mother's quest to help her child will resonate with many readers. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Strange Beauty: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720712/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dce8e34e. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720712
The Mercury Fountain
Diego Baez
Booklist. 108.11 (Feb. 1, 2012): p39+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Mercury Fountain.
By Eliza Factor.
Mar. 2012. 320p.Akashic. paper, $15.95 (9781617750366).
Mercury, the Roman deity of commerce, is the perfect icon for Factor's first novel, a family drama set in Pristina, an American outpost in the Chihuahuan wilderness in the early 1900s. The plot traces the literal and figurative fortunes of the Scraperton family--Owen, town founder and utopian visionary; his freethinking wife, Dolores; and their hardheaded daughter, Victoria--as they rise and fall with the price of the mercury that is mined deep beneath the town. After a frustrated attempt to lobby national lawmakers for a railroad extension and a disfiguring injury to Victoria, a series of incidents threatens to send Pristina spiraling into the dust. A plot to poison the water supply, dismissed as the empty threat of a disgruntled miner, comes to fruition years later when mercury prices plummet. Dolores reverts to her native Catholicism. Victoria mimics a Hopi snake dance--her forked tongue is another item in Factor's well-crafted set of symbols--to seduce a mistakenly wanted man. Finally, Owen's descent into obsessive denial functions as the axis around which the fates of Pristina and the Scrapertons entwine.--Diego Baez
Baez, Diego
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "The Mercury Fountain." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 39+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A280387033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7f5243ef. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A280387033
Factor, Eliza. Love Maps
Samantha Gust
Xpress Reviews. (May 8, 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Factor, Eliza. Love Maps. Akashic. May 2015. 224p. ISBN 9781617752735. pap. $15.95; ebk. ISBN 9781617753633. F
When artist/teacher Sarah Marker receives a letter from Philip, her estranged husband of seven years, she panics. He writes that he will be nearby for a conference and will be on her doorstep the morning of October 15, which just happens to be the very next day (guess you can't expect mail from the Congo to arrive in a timely fashion). After much hemming and hawing, she puts their seven-year-old son (whom she never told Philip about) in the car and takes off. The title Love Maps is taken from a series of Sarah's paintings that maps people's hookups and breakups, but readers could use a map to navigate this compelling yet maddening novel. The chapters alternate between the early 1980s and 1997, and the reader must concentrate to follow the myriad plot points and characters tangled up in superfluous descriptions of major home appliances and donuts, among other things.
Verdict Factor's sophomore effort (after The Mercury Fountain) paints a poignant picture of familial and romantic love and their complexities, but the canvas is wrinkled.--Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
Gust, Samantha
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gust, Samantha. "Factor, Eliza. Love Maps." Xpress Reviews, 8 May 2015. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A416302155/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f9bd977. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416302155
Poisoned in Body and Spirit
‘The Mercury Fountain,’ by Eliza Factor
By FLOYD SKLOOTMARCH 2, 2012
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Eliza Factor’s first novel, “The Mercury Fountain,” explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people. Though the action takes place between 1900 and 1923, the resonances feel alarmingly contemporary.
The setting is Pristina, an imaginary utopian community 10 miles from the Rio Grande in southwestern Texas. Its founder, the New Englander Owen Scraperton, envisions people of any race, background or economic circumstance working together for a common purpose. That this purpose turns out to be the mining of mercury suggests where Owen, a messianic figure equal parts preacher and cult leader, will lead his followers.
“Mr. Scraperton believes that mercury has mystical properties and that the mining of it is good for the Soul,” one resident observes. Owen buys the community a mercury fountain — a steel chalice holding a writhing, devilish display of the element known as quicksilver — and when he speaks of mercury, the look in his eyes is “the look of an adolescent describing his first love, that gleam, that irrevocable faith in its beauty and goodness.”
Owen also believes people will abide by the principles of clarity, unity and purpose upon which he conceived Pristina. Clarity will let them apprehend natural law, and to achieve it they will give up alcohol, tobacco, gambling, superstition. Unity will move them beyond racial or ethnic identity, turning each into “a Pristinian, a Unified Man, inherently suited to his Labor.” And labor, “the key to a unified society,” will provide the “bridge to the Future.” Suffering from difficult economic times, people sign on to work the mines. But few buy into the principles.
Photo
Eliza Factor Credit Kate Milford
Owen delivers stirring speeches while paying his workers in chits rather than cash, and marries the beautiful Dolores, an impoverished but aristocratic Mexican who assumes he is rich. In the novel’s urgent opening, Dolores endures protracted labor while a local boy descends into the terrifying heart of the mining operation to summon Owen to her bedside. There are no easy, safe, natural events in “The Mercury Fountain.”
Unfortunately for Owen, as for his family and followers, mercury is ferociously toxic, good for neither the soul nor the body. When illness spreads and the mercury market fails, Pristina’s principles crumble. As Owen grows desperate and sick, his marriage destabilizes and his relationship with his beloved daughter suffers.
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The novel’s plot and mood are familiar, predictable until an operatic conclusion that involves snakes and fire and general mayhem. Fiction about mining has a long tradition — Émile Zola’s “Germinal” and Upton Sinclair’s “King Coal” come to mind — and most readers will be aware of the industry’s harsh conditions. There is also a long tradition of utopian fiction to prepare us for Pristina’s fate. But Factor counters convention with a sharp sense of character, evocative subplots and the dangerous allure of mercury itself: “A silver droplet wiggled on the palm of his hand. They had called it living silver in the Middle Ages. Quicksilver now. Silver endowed with the quick of life.”
Across the novel’s two decades, Owen and Dolores follow an erratic path toward marital accommodation, and their “ridiculously precocious” daughter demonstrates a surprising blend of her parents’ strengths and weaknesses. Secondary characters, hauntingly affected by events, underscore Factor’s point that unyielding ideals cannot guide or govern.
“Owen was enamored, enamored,” we are told. “He admitted the dangers of the mercuries of Almaden and Konia, but his mercury, Pristinite Mercury, was different. Pristinite Mercury only damaged those whose wills wavered, whose constitutions were somehow corrupt. The good and the virtuous it left alone, or even, somehow, benefited.”
This is the mind of madness. Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine “la mina de los muertos,” the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail. “The Mercury Fountain” shows this with terrible clarity and purpose.
THE MERCURY FOUNTAIN
By Eliza Factor
312 pp. Akashic Books. Paper, $15.95.
Floyd Skloot’s 16th book, the story collection “Cream of Kohlrabi,” was published in September.
A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2012, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Poisoned in Body and Spirit
Strange Beauty by Eliza Factor
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By Mom Egg Review on September 3, 2017 Book Reviews
Review by Michelle Everett Wilbert
I was 41 years old, a midwife and the mother of three children when our youngest daughter was born with spina bifida; a spinal defect of the earliest weeks of fetal development wherein the spinal cord fails to close properly. The ensuing sixteen years have been times of great joy and some sadness and frustration as we’ve tried—and often failed—to navigate what we’ve come to refer to as “disability world” in our pursuit of a life for our daughter outside a system of “services” designed to support people with disabilities which too often results in further segregation and marginalization. The deeper truths of living life with a child with a disability are found through engaging the necessary and unavoidable dualism of embracing the “Strange Beauty”—the title of this sensitively crafted memoir by Eliza Factor—of living alongside a beloved child who cannot co-exist comfortably within a larger culture still rife with barriers to full inclusion. While we argue on social media about the continued, wincing reality of prejudice of all kinds, most people remain unaware of and insensitive to the needs and experiences of people with disabilities and their families.
Factor does an admirable and thorough job of combining a deeply personal and nuanced exploration of her own journey with her son, her family, and her community, and the ongoing struggles of families to work within the maze of medical and social systems designed to care for and support people with disabilities that are overrun with bureaucracy and insufficient funding. She deftly and gently probes her own feelings, responses and decisions while continually offering gratitude not only for her beloved son, Felix, but for her husband, family and friends, and her willingness to both accept—and question—the inequities and disparities built into the system even as she continues to try to access them for her son and family.
Strange Beauty begins with the story of Factor’s pregnancy, the discovery of Felix’s various disabilities, and the causes and prognosis offered by a variety of medical experts all of whom are unable to really define the extent or limits of his disability in terms that are in any way predictive. Eventually, everyone realizes that getting to know Felix and learning to follow where he leads is the path forward and through journal entries and vivid descriptions of events, we are taken by the hand to walk along as Factor retraces the steps of life with her son.
Factor is at her best when she’s describing the challenges involved in accomplishing the most mundane tasks and errands while hauling necessary equipment and accompaniments on one arm and a child in the other onto subways and up and down stairs while trying not to bump into people, trip or drop her child. She is candid and open as she expresses the fatigue and frustration a parent feels when one clinician recommends that a child be seen by a particular specialist “as soon as possible” only to find out that she can’t get an appointment for weeks or months—and she leans in with palpable rawness as she talks about the hardest, most exhausting days and nights with Felix. As she relays the inevitable complexities of finding help for her child, she thoughtfully weaves a thread throughout her memoir about the ways in which social position and financial security—or the lack thereof—factor in the lives of parents of children faced with unique challenges. She expresses an acute awareness of her privilege: white, educated, and affluent, and able, then, to access the best care for her son while realizing that even with all of these advantages, living life with Felix is often painful, difficult, bewildering and just plain hard. Her sense of concern for those families who do not have her resources becomes a motivating force for social change and action on behalf of her son and other children with disabilities and their families.
This lovely memoir is honest, compelling and thoughtful. Parents of children with disabilities will find it a testament to love and commitment as well as a needed narrative of intimate commiseration. The book has its strongest potential, perhaps, in serving as a catalyst for deeper sharing and understanding while providing a blueprint for changing attitudes about disability through the simple, time-honored and human need for storytelling–allowing others inside the “Strange Beauty” of life with an extraordinary child.
Strange Beauty
by Eliza Factor
Parallax Press, 2017, $18.95 (paper)
ISBN 9781941529720
Book Review: LOVE MAPS by Eliza Factor
August 17, 2015 by admin ·
photo 02a78057-fe1e-48a8-bad3-aabe022bb389_zps7cmcgonp.jpg Love Maps
by Eliza Factor
Akashic Books, 2015
$15.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Bingler
Love Maps, published in May by Akashic Books, is Eliza Factor’s second novel. Her first novel, The Mercury Fountain—about a utopian society that mines mercury in order to reap its “magical” benefits—was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice in 2012. Factor considers The Mercury Fountain and Love Maps as the first and third novels, respectively, in a series of three. Although both novels are thematically different—Love Maps, unlike The Mercury Fountain, does not contain any elements of magical realism—they exist in the same world, feature many of the same locations, and have many overlapping characters. Love Maps focuses on a more realistic (albeit often bizarre) portrayal of life: it is about dysfunctional relationships—whether they are romantic, platonic, or familial—and the consequences of unusual or unintended expressions of love.
Love Maps begins in Connecticut in 1997. Sarah Marker, the protagonist, receives a letter from her long-absent husband Philip, informing her that he will be visiting her after nearly eight years. During his absence, Sarah gave birth to a son, Max, of whom Philip knows nothing about. Suddenly, it’s 1981, and Sarah is a thirty-one year old painter living in New York City. She wakes up to a telephone call from her godmother, Tori, informing her that Tori’s husband, Conningsby, has died. And that is how Sarah meets Philip for the first time, at a funeral parlor where they are expected to pick up Conningsby’s ashes. The novel juxtaposes Sarah’s past with her present through chapters alternating in time between the 1980s and 1997, dominantly following her relationships with Philip and her sister, Maya.
The title of the novel comes from a series of paintings Sarah creates, which documents her various romantic relationships throughout time. They mimic a subway map and show different colored dots for locations of breakups and hookups. Factor has described Love Maps as being fueled by the “friction between pride and desire.” This statement is most obviously demonstrated by Sarah in 1997, for it is this friction that causes her to drink and thoroughly examine her past relationship(s), and decide whether or not she should forgive Philip for leaving her. She desires Philip because he is “decent,” but she is too proud to admit this because of how he has treated her (which was the result of how Maya treated him). A subtler version of friction can be seen through the novel’s, or Sarah’s, understanding of time: the 1997 chapters are in the past tense, and the 1980s chapters are in the present tense. This move warps our linear expectation of time, and shows that the past feels like the present to Sarah, and vice versa.
Despite Sarah’s role as the novel’s protagonist, her sister Maya overshadows her throughout the story. Maya is consistently selfish, manipulative, and violent; she ruins Philip’s life and destroys his relationship with Sarah. Her singing career is mildly successful; she makes her fortune by selling real estate. But it is her cruelty and failure that make her an interesting character, combined with the fact that Maya, a middle-aged woman, has never been able to properly imitate her idol, Rita Hayworth, let alone mimic her career arc. Sarah lacks agency as a character, and it is this that makes her less interesting; she responds passively to Maya’s continuous violence towards her and Philip, and she cannot effectively communicate with either of them or reveal to Philip that they have a child. But it is this that makes the novel more “realistic,” for these characters are flawed and confused—they’re not witty, and they often act like they’re still in their twenties. Despite my frustration with the qualities that made them more realistic, the novel was entertaining and suspenseful—mainly because of Maya’s antics—and the drama moved the story forward and kept me reading.
Factor intends to continue her series with the novel that connects The Mercury Fountain and Love Maps, which will focus on Sarah’s parents and their life in the circus during WWII. Sarah’s parents were intriguing characters in Love Maps, but we learned little about them other than that they were adventurous, secretive, and died in a plane crash. It seems that Factor has left us the best for last: her third novel promises to be much more ambitious, and even more entertaining than her first two novels—after all, she has been mulling over its contents for more than twenty years.
The Mercury Fountain by Eliza Factor (A Review by Lynne Weiss)
Posted on November 20, 2012
Akashic Press
280 pgs/$15.95
The Mercury Fountain is Eliza Factor’s first novel, so I did not know her writing or reputation, but her book caught my eye because of the publisher, Akashic Press. Akashic is what you might call a “big” small press with a catalog of about 250 titles built up over the sixteen years they have been in business. With the tagline “reverse-gentrification of the literary world,” Brooklyn-based Akashic has carved out an interesting niche for itself with its dedication to “publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction.” Founded by Johnny Temple, a former bassist of Girls Against Boys, Akashic has had great success with among other things, its city-based Noir anthologies. The first in the series was Brooklyn Noir, but the series has expanded to include nearly every major and not-so-major American city and many international cities, with titles such as Baghdad Noir and Lagos Noir forthcoming.
There is nothing particularly noir about Factor’s novel (and Akashic also has an extensive list of literary fiction and political nonfiction), but the second aspect of the book that appealed to me was the setting: a utopian community on the Texas-Mexico border in the early 1900s. I can’t say that I love reading books about this time and place (I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of another novel with this setting) but I’m interested in the time period, so I took it on. From the first sentence- The scream must have come from Casa Grande– I was trapped like a miner in a tunnel. In fact, from that first sentence we move quickly to a terrifying (for this claustrophobe) several pages of journeying into the netherworld with Ysidro, a 12-year-old boy who understandably develops his own fear of the mines as a result of his journey, and thus finds pursuing his expected occupation- mining- impossible to pursue.
Pristina is no typical mining town. It was founded by Owen Scraperton, a Massachusetts idealist, on the principles of “clarity, unity, and purpose.” In practice, this means a community based on rationality and racial harmony rather than religion and ritual. And yet much of what drives Scraperton is his aesthetic fascination with mercury. Although mercury, or quick silver, had considerable industrial value in 1900 (it was used to extract gold and silver from ore), Owen’s fascination with this substance is also aesthetic. He places a mercury fountain in the center of Pristina so that residents can enjoy the fascination of this substance, which exists between liquid and solid forms.
The fountain was not efficient or didactic or scientific- it was beautiful. Owen had some sort of excuse that beauty acted as the engine of evolution and therefore ought to be studied and generated in order to spur the race along. But forget about that. It was lovely in itself, the way the mercury flowed over the rim, its mobile, mirror effect.
Unfortunately, the toxic qualities of mercury were little understood at this time, and Ysidro is not the only character trapped by the mines. Owen invests everything he has in Pristina, where he falls in love with Dolores, a vibrant, independent, and aristocratic young Mexican woman.
Owen had first seen Dolores on Generalissimo, skimming across the Coahuilan plain, nothing like the side-saddled women he’d grown up with. It was incredible to him, finding her. Religion had warped every woman he had met to one extreme or another. And there in Mexico, with the whole country under the pall of dictators and priests, Dolores rode on her horse, free as the day she was born.
Owen is drawn to Dolores for her passionate nature and her willingness to defy convention, but just as he rationalizes his fascination with mercury because it is useful, he believes that he can base his relationship with Dolores on rational principles. It is only much later that Dolores understands that Owen’s attitude toward marriage is at odds with her own:
He didn’t want a woman at all; he wanted an enterprise-sharer. Shopkeepers, he said, had the best marriages because they were immersed in the same enterprise. Did she look like shopkeeper? Is that what he had seen?
One of the strengths of Factor’s book is her ability to portray Owen’s fascination with Dolores, as well as the community’s love of Dolores over time. Owen, it seems, is great on the vision thing, but when people need help or support or sympathy, his devotion to rationalism fails them. Factor also brings to life Owen and Delores’s shared love for their daughter Victoria, who tries to bring her father’s rational idealism and her mother’s earthy passion together.
I admired this novel’s portrayal of a long but not always happy marriage. Dolores’s dissatisfaction is very real, as are her reasons for continuing with Owen. But what I admired the most was the structure of the novel. The story covers a span of twenty-three years, but like Mercury or mercury, it coalesces and moves through time, carrying us to each pool of crisis, tension, and change and providing with quick strokes– all the background we need to understand where we are in the story and what has happened in the intervening years, portraying a world that is fascinating and yet doomed.