Alison Kirk

True to Herself: One Vermont Writer's Lifetime of Making Good Things from Bad Alison Kirk

True to Herself: One Vermont Writer's Lifetime of Making Good Things from Bad is a rich and varied collection of essays and memoirs that convey the funny, sad, and whimsical experiences of a woman writer making her home in Vermont. The main character and true protagonist of the book is Anne Kirby's eccentric little house in Cornwell, Vermont. The parts called "Mulling It Over in Vermont" are collections of Anne's newspaper columns that most clearly reflect her life in the little house at the end of a dirt road, where she's connected to the outside world by delivery and repair men, a mailbox, a telephone line, and the rabbit ears of a TV. The many humorous dilemmas, the comical complications, and the imagination-generated anxieties of a widow living alone in the country all stand in stark contrast to the changing culture of the Reagan '80s and encroaching Yuppiedom. Interspersed with these essays are sections called "Life Outside Vermont," a memoir in which we see the origins of Anne's love of country life, her yearning for "home," her confusion over finding a path in life, and her writer's peculiar sensibility at odds with her environment. We can also see the resilience of a misfit able to laugh at herself and bumble into a fulfilling life. The essays in the final third of the book, more somber in tone and subject matter, focus on the evolving meanings of Anne's house. "Into Place: A Diary of Love, Loss, and Discovery in Vermont" tells of the origins of the Vermont house in her tempestuous and tragic marriage and describes her evolving relationship with the home that comes to represent everything that is truest in herself. This also is the place in which the transmutation of "bad things" into "good" begins. The essays in the final "Place Marks in a Journal" key into Anne's gradual, and at times painful, process of letting go of one place in order to create another one with another new life.  Poet, critic, and novelist Jay Parini called Kirk "a beautiful writer, with an intimate sense of language," whose "good humor and wit shine through her essays."