Overview

When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.

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9781956692778

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"""The Truth About Unringing Phones is an exploration of yearning, of guilt, of unfulfilled wishes, of regrets, past and present, but more than these things, it is a quiet prayer for peace in a tumultuous relationship between a daughter and her father. The main characters are complex, contradictory, and vulnerable in their alone-ness and connections to themselves and each other. Lillibridge has woven a deeply moving assemblage of memories, each shining light into the quagmire of family."" -Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Song Poet: a Memoir of my Father The Truth About Unringing Phones is heartbreakingly beautiful. Full of both darkness and light, Lara Lillibridge honors both the full weight of her love for her father and the complicated, and often painful, foundation on which that love, and all the memories surrounding it, was built. -Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files ""What a beautiful thing to take the ugly messiness of family and make of it a search for solace. Much like the way memory works, these fragments and pieces and shells trace the history and frustration of an estranged father-daughter relationship. They tell a story of longing, and loss. Of where love goes when it gets lost itself. They tell a story as old as time, or the day the first daughter was born and the first father came into being."" -Paul Creshaw, author of Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other '80s Perils and Pushcart Prize Recipient 2017. With admirable courage and raw candor, Lara Lillibridge chronicles the wrenching paradoxes that shaped her complicated relationship with her father in this stunning collection. The story's unconventional narrative structure that pairs long-form essay with searing, fragmented vignettes which mirror Lillibridge's journey to piece together the problematic dimensions of her absentee and neglectful father and to understand her place as daughter within that landscape. The Truth About Unringing Phones exemplifies how, amidst the heartbreak, threads of compassion, love, and grace can still be woven into the fabric of our most difficult relationships. -Melanie Brooks, author of A Hard Silence and Writing Hard Stories"

Author Information

Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of Mama, Mama, Only Mama (Skyhorse, 2019), Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (Skyhorse, 2018), and co-editor of the anthology, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility (Cynren Press, 2019). Lillibridge is the Interviews Editor at Hippocampus Magazine and currently serves as a mentor for AWP's Writer to Writer program. Lara graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. In 2016 she won Slippery Elm Literary Journal's Prose Contest, and The American Literary Review's Contest in Nonfiction.

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