Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Glenda Burgess' "The Geography of Love"

Glenda Burgess is a winner of the Rupert Hughes Award for literary fiction, and a short story finalist for the New Century Writer Award.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Geography of Love, and reported the following:
“We lived next door to a temple, and I could go over during services to see the men, and look for my grandfather or father. My friend Paulie was with me. The men made a big deal of us boys and were very loving and inviting. I miss that feeling of belonging. My place. A sense of belonging in the soul…. It is hard not to know what you are but to know only what you are not.”
--page 99, The Geography of Love

The Geography of Love is a memoir, a story of challenges and triumphs, of love and finding oneself in the world. Ken Grunzweig, my husband and the central focus of this memoir, wrote the words above to me in a letter working through understanding the deep chasm in his family and Jewish identity - thoughts that came forward with a host of interior glimpses into the crux and essence of life’s work, loss, friendship, and love. Page 99 marks one turn, one mile post in our journey together through both the halcyon days of love and marriage, and nine months of what would become Ken’s desperate battle against a very serious illness. The scope of this memoir is about our interior geography and the bending influence of the outer world that makes us who we are.
Read an excerpt from The Geography of Love, and learn more about the author and her work at Glenda Burgess' website and her blog.

--Marshal Zeringue