A Marriage in Startled Air: A Memoir - Paperback

by Patricia Foster (Author)

In A Marriage in Startled Air, Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband's rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the journey of recovery--and discovery--between two artists in a relatively happy marriage leads to difficult conversations about family, memory, identity, and aging. Within this unburdening, Patricia and David discover a new map of intimacy: Once the illusion of normalcy is broken, what emerges is something sweeter and deeper, as if the broken thing becomes, ironically, the healing thing.

Author Biography

PATRICIA FOSTER is the author of All the Lost Girls, Just Beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek, and Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter. She has edited four anthologies and received a PEN Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hall-Waters Award for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Clarence Cason Award, and an Alabama Truman Capote Prize for fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for more than twenty-five years and has taught in France, Australia, Italy, and Spain. She currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa.