The Beautiful Agonies (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478039716)

The Beautiful Agonies is a luminous, genre-bending work of literary nonfiction that braids intimate memoir, lyric essay, Buddhism, and anthropological insight into a meditation on aging, maternal caregiving, dying, and the beauty of the natural world. With fierce tenderness, Kusserow chronicles her mother's final year of life in rural Vermont--days shaped by stark comedy and bodily decline, loneliness and fear, a scrappy, dogged search for meaning, and the intense beauty of the Vermont landscape. Kusserow's trained anthropological lens, alert to stigma, cultural scripts, and the performance of "good aging," sits alongside a tender daughter's heart, creating a poetic, nuanced narrative that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally shattering. Kusserow's poetic and culturally perceptive voice--by turns wry, furious, reverent, and quietly funny--refuses sentimentality while still delivering catharsis. The Beautiful Agonies offers readers an extraordinary intersection of humanities and health, ethics and embodied emotion, cultural critique and spiritual inquiry, and a mother and daughter's shared love of the natural world, a work as philosophically searching as it is heartbreakingly human.

Author: Adrie Kusserow
ISBN-10: 147803971X
ISBN-13: 9781478039716
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/16/2027
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.98lbs