I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“The events of a single episode of Howard Norman’s superb memoir are both on the edge of chaos and gathered superbly into coherent meaning . . . A wise riskily written beautiful book.” — Michael OndaatjeHoward Norman’s spellbinding memoir begins with a portrait both harrowing and hilarious of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes California as a student of birds. Years later in Washington D.C. an act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. In Norman’s hands life’s arresting strangeness is made into a profound creative and redemptive story.“Uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.” —Washington Post“These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences he finds solace through the places he’s lived and their quirky inhabitants human and avian.” —The New Yorker