Many Seasons - Paperback

by Frances Badalamenti (Author), Aaron Wessling (Photographer)

Many Seasons is a skein, an elaborate tangle unraveling and being rewound. This story and the self inside it must get undone in order to be seen and painstakingly reassembled. Just as personhood is non-linear, in this story, memory mingles with moment and matter-of-factly presents the formidable questions: Are attachments a reward or a burden? Stability or freedom? Independence, or that obvious one: love? Ana, our protagonist, steadily excavates all of this-along with generations of familial patterns, both repeating and interrupting them in her own evolving family. She critiques motherhood while enacting it, she discovers her gender as she observes it through her writing, and questions her relationships while staying in them. Many Seasons is really about being known; coming to terms with the fact that the richest part of us, one's interior, may go unknown except to itself. And perhaps, in this case, to the page. By keeping her own narrative, Ana makes a record of renewal, of recovery, of domestic labor, of anxiety as a parallel realm. She shows us that healing is a threshold and a path, that selfhood is a grand, nesting landscape, and that much like home, it is a shelter made by effort, devotion.