Pure Flame
  • Published: 4 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473548787
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Pure Flame

On Mothers and Daughters

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Nov 2021
Hardback
2 Jan 2022
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An intellectual and personal reckoning with a very particular unease about what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter.

'Rich and moving' New York Times
'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter

During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.

So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city.

A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called 'the great unwritten story': that of the mother-daughter bond.

Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.
  • Published: 4 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473548787
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

Michelle Orange

Michelle Orange was born and raised in London, Canada; she now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published in Harper's, McSweeney's, The Nation, Bookforum, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, Slate, Film Comment, The Village Voice, and other publications.

Her first book, a collection of essays called THIS IS RUNNING FOR YOUR LIFE, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013, and was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the National Post, Flavorwire, and other publications.

She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

Praise for Pure Flame

Recasts the notion of maternal legacy and fills it with pointed mystery and informed sincerity. Pure Flame is a tutorial in bending creative non-fiction.

Kiese Laymon

The best book I've read this year...unsparing, stylishly written, and profoundly loving, the book is as original as it is powerful... a book that expands and breaks your heart, not with sentimentality but with its intelligence and compassion.

Adelle Waldman

A provocative, meditative, funny, feminist adventure about two women trying to tell each other the stories that matter while there's still time.

Alexander Chee

Sometimes achingly sad, but often warm and evocative... a brilliant work of feminist critique.

Lauren Puckett-Pope, US Elle

Rich and moving . . . Orange skirts the traps of the mother-daughter memoir by going beyond personal history. . . Pure Flame may be Orange's legacy.

Maggie Doherty, New York Times

Powerful . . .honest, fair, and compassionate.

Veronica Esposito, Literary Hub

[A] nuanced and original memoir

Terri Apter, Times Literary Supplement