The Object Parade: Essays

Description

This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell? In recalling her experience, Dinah's essays each begin with one thing -- real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the gifted watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth's love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream. Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of moving to Los Angeles and raising a family; of coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with up-ended notions about home and family and career and aging, too. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time.

Dinah Lenney is the author of Bigger than Life, published in the American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press, and excerpted for the "Lives" column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. She serves as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars and for the Rainier Writing Workshop, and in the writing program at the University of Southern California. She has played a wide range of roles in theater and television, on shows such as ER, Murphy Brown, Law and Order, Monk, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Sons of Anarchy. She lives in Los Angeles.

Praise for The Object Parade: "Dinah Lenney has done something smart. She's come up with a solution to the essayist's dilemma. She's figured out a way to stay true to the form of the essay -- digressive, skeptical, friendly, and brief -- in the Age of the Memoir." --Los Angeles Review of Books "The essays are a poignant reminder of the way certain objects around us shape our lives and become a touchstone for our personal memories." Fast Company "[Lenney] follows her vision like a North Star, and her faith is ultimately rewarded. Her stories will stick with you, long after the object of a book has faded."-Los Angeles Times "What Lenney has created in The Object Parade is a linguistically rich meditation on all types of human connection--both with ourselves and each other." --The Nervous Breakdown "How better to track the stages, shape, and meaning of a life than by way of the significant objects in it? But Dinah Lenney is a good deal more than clever. Every object she embraces in this beautifully-wrought book -- the piano, the Christmas tree, the mole, the green earrings -- discloses the compressed and hidden power of things, the nouns with which we write our lives. Piece by piece, the author reveals herself as a first rate observer in possession of a kind and generous mind -- the most treasurable object in her rich parade." --Roger Rosenblatt "The Object Parade is a wonderful book--an inquiry, a quest. The relation of objects to individuals is perhaps its secret charm. It doesn't simply narrate --underneath is the persistent urgency to understand, to consider, beyond the joys and anguish of the self, the meaning of these bright and sometimes out-of-focus slides that pass before us, revealing not only a life but a growing consciousness. I read with deep pleasure and that sensation of being in a book, that is rarer than it should be." --Patricia Hampl "Spoon, piano, flight jacket, Ferris wheel--The Object Parade courts tactile memory. Driven by Dinah Lenney's distinctive, insouciant voice, at once engagingly authoritative and tenaciously self-questioning, the heft of a guitar, smell of chicken simmering, or ticking metronome are brought to life again, then re-examined under the magnifying glass of time. The story of family and fate (with its rich panoply of relationship and revelation) unfolds here as "one thing" does inevitably "lead to another" in the hands of an author who gives us genuine insight at its subtle, insistent best."--Judith Kitchen, author of Half in Shade and The Circus Train "From politics to the piano to the lament of a mourning dove, Dinah Lenney looks life in the eye and never finds it wanting. Like Proust's madeleines, her "objects" scent the terrain of this book with memories from the evanescent to the profound. The world itself, examined with joy, shines out through each small detail. You will love this book, one object at a time, right down to its very end."--Linda Gray Sexton, author of Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton and Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. "The Object Parade is a rich, poignant homage to, quite literally, the stuff of life. Lenney is a gifted essayist, but her ear for the riddles and rhythms of language reveals the sensibilities of a poet--even a musician. She doesn't just write to us. She sings to us. You won't just read this collection, you will hear it."--Meghan Daum "Dinah Lenney's marvel of a book is both unflinching and confiding. Her subjects are, ostensibly, the familiar objects of daily life. But no matter what this writer sets her sights on--a scarf, a coffee scoop, a pair of shoes--its sure to yield unexpected meanings, intricate histories, and memorable stories. The objects in this parade quickly transcend their personal significance to the writer and stir the reader with a sharpened sense of life's pleasures and risks. Lenney knows that everything we touch has the power to change us." --Bernard Cooper "..heart-stopping..This creatively structured book remains an enjoyable read, and the standout essays merit the price of admission." --Publishers Weekly "A pensive perusal of the objects that can define and shape a life... the collection's pieces build on each other, layer upon vivid layer of Lenney's personal history, her heart firmly invested in hearth and home...One of the book's most moving entries also happens to be its shortest: a strikingly gorgeous, two-page homage to Lenney's daughter, portrayed as a young girl bouncing in the sun trailing a kite flush with bright streamers. An eclectic treasury of the cherished and the evocative." --Kirkus Reviews Praise for Bigger Than Life: A Los Angeles Times Bestseller (March 2007) "A brilliant contribution to autobiographical, literary non-fiction; the author takes us right into her con--sciousness, and recreates thought and feelings with passion and restraint. This book is a model of engaged and engaging memoir-writing."--Phillip Lopate "I read this in one sitting, transported into the life of a man I now feel I knew personally. It's a compel--ling story about death and the way life goes on around it--beautifully written and perfectly orchestrated, a book that is as enlightening as it is easy to read."--Susan Cheever "Before his murder, Dinah Lenney's father was Bigger than Life but looms larger in death."--Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair "This affecting memoir ends on a note of grace as Lenney acknowledges her hard-won peace with her father's memory and his murder...Such transcendent realizations elevate Bigger Than Life...beyond an account of the bombastic life and brutal death of Nelson Gross to speak of life and healing found in the midst of tragedy." --Paula L. Woods, The Los Angeles Times Book Review "The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with an artful layering of details and remembered conversations, brings her complex, confounding father back to literary life." --Los Angeles Magazine "Vivid, revealing, and meditative... [This] is a book well worth reading, not only for some dazzling chapters and evocative details about the American justice system, but also for the contribution it makes to the body of American literature about fathers."--Fourth Genre "A driving vocal performance--tour de force momentum for pages at a stretch, and studded throughout with hard-earned human insight. While Lenney can be bracingly acerbic, the affection moving through this work is tidal."--Sven Birkerts "In one sense, [Lenney's] book can be seen as therapy, a way of purging a decade's worth of inner turmoil. But the story also explores a broader issue, the way the death of one man can affect the lives of many people... Not a typical 'survivor's autobiography,' but a deeply affecting one."--Booklist