Television, a Memoir - Paperback

by Karen Brennan (Author)

Television, a memoir is a hybrid collection of autobiographical pieces, tragi-comic in spirit, that depict a woman's life evolving through time and culture in fragmentary glimpses. Indeterminate in genre, Television is a fluid text that sometimes reads as poetry, sometimes as prose, while exploring classism, ableism, and feminism in a world defined by the advent of new media and, for the author, a privilege that often felt suffocating. Working structurally and thematically, television creates conceptual mileposts in the memoir, with certain programs and cultural references corresponding to specific eras in the author's past, but it also gestures at an existential modality -- the experience of a televisual life, the performative arrangements of nuclear families and neighborhoods, the periodic events and dramas of an adolescence watched from outside oneself.

Author Biography

Karen Brennan is the author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and an AWP award, she is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in anthologies from Norton, Penguin, Graywolf, Georgia, and Michigan, among others. Since 1991, she has served as core faculty in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Television, a memoir is her eighth book.