Places I've Taken My Body

Review 'These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our own interior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much grace and gratitude as we can muster.' - Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize winning author of AMITY & PROSPERITY 'Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveler, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world.' - Claire Dederer Product Description 'Urgent, compelling and lyrically, luminously beautiful . . . a brilliant, heart-rending read.' Psychologies Magazine Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, Eugenics, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human: flawed, potent, feeling. Review Urgent, compelling and lyrically, luminously beautiful . . . a brilliant, heart-rending read. ― Psychologies Magazine An eloquent essay collection . . . Places I've Taken My Body accomplishes what literature does best. It allows readers an opportunity to step into someone else's shoes . . . Brown offers a clear window onto her world. ― TLS Made me see differently - one of the great gifts of literature. ― Irish Times, The Best Books of 2021 Lyrically beautiful. ― The Simple Things These remarkable essays invite us to look long and hard at our own interior landscapes, and to negotiate exterior ones with as much grace and gratitude as we can muster. -- Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize winning author of AMITY & PROSPERITY Molly McCully Brown is a barometer, reading the weather of her own body. Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveler, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world. ― Claire Dederer I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know. Writing from the locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, Molly McCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience -- desire, loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory -- with lyric compression and expansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get out and do something with my own body -- kneel at an altar and recite the Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop and shout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these are urgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive inside our own bodies, wherever we take them. -- Jamie Quatro, author of FIRE SERMON Book Description This metaphsyscial, intimate and visceral essay collection is stunning in its insight and suffused with optimism. Molly McCully Brown is the Rebecca Solnit of the body. About the Author Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020.) Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her essay collection, Places I've Taken My Body, was published in 2021.