Lucy Ferriss - Ring in the New(s)

With Rilla Askew and Mary Kay Zuravleff at the Authors Guild Gala

Read Past Newsletters

"Ferriss strikes the perfect balance between the global and the personal." -- Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

Ring in the New(s)

Approach to the George Washington Bridge

January 12, 2022

The year 2022 does feel like a baby, still innocent and playful, free of malice toward humans and other living things. I'm spending the first month of it on an urban retreat, in the Hudson Heights section of Manhattan, in a roomy apartment in a prewar building right across from Fort Tryon Park. I had hoped, of course, to be out among sophisticates enjoying the cultural treasures of the city, but Omicron put that fantasy to rest. Still, I enjoy spending time in the hive, getting everywhere via public transportation or on my own two feet, and exploring a new neighborhood. I've been astounded by the heights themselves – those abrupt, steep outcroppings of schist that rise on either side of Broadway. I went for an actual hike – not a city stroll – in Inwood Park, just north of Fort Tryon, where blazed trails climb and descend until you get a great view of Spuyten Duyvil. I've also wandered down from the highest point in Manhattan to the Little Red Lighthouse, where there is an actual bank by the Hudson River and views downtown and north along the Palisades.

The year also arrived with some good news for my work. Meditations for a New Century, a collection of nonlinear essays I've been tinkering with for a decade, won the 2022 Wandering Aengus Book Award and will be published probably early in 2023. Because the essays try to follow the course of my own mind, it's both heartening and terrifying to think that others may be interested in what that mind is up to. For a taste of a couple of these meditations, check out my Short Stuff page.

As I pulled the collection together, I found myself reading others' meditations, especially Montaigne's and Descartes'. There is a certain didactic feel to those (though apparently Montaigne tried to avoid preaching) that hints of mansplaining, but they're still absorbing, especially Montaigne's essay on cannibalism, where he shines a light on his own continent's practices and concludes that "there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead." My reading this fall seems to have been among those who are virtually eaten alive – victims of the upheavals in Ethiopia (Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears), Libya (Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men), and the self-sabotaging family (Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain).

My New Year's resolution is to do more happy reading, at least when it comes to fiction – the news doesn't seem to have much uplift on offer. Irony is more the tone of the day. Take, for instance, the current affaire Djokovic. In case you missed it, here are the basics. The tennis star with winged feet and heart of clay has been spouting absurd anti-vax Covid theories for months. In early January, he arrived, unvaxxed, in Melbourne to play (and presumably win) the Aussie Open. He sported an exemption buttressed by the evidence that he had contracted and recovered from Covid in the previous month. But Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the Trump lover known best for his brutality toward refugees, needed headlines to push his campaign for reelection and chose to overrule the state of Victoria and revoke Djokovic's visa. Novak ("Novax") then went to a Morrison-hating judge who decreed that the star was exactly the victim he'd portrayed himself to be, and reinstated the visa . . . only to have evidence emerge that Djokovic a) had lied about his international travel in the weeks leading up to his arrival and b) was photographed among others, happily unmasked, during the days when he supposedly knew he had been infected with Covid.

Fiction writers are always being told to include a likable character in their stories. Here, no one is remotely likable, and yet somehow, amid the grim news of the day, I find this standoff among bad actors immensely entertaining, better even than Don't Look Up. (On which a whole newsletter could be written, but that's someone else's job.) I hope you are all finding something to lift your spirits and give you continued hope for this still-fresh year.

Warm wishes,

Lucy

http://lucyferriss.com

P.S. My collection of stories, Foreign Climes (Brighthorse, 2021), seems to have solved its distribution problems and is now for sale on Amazon and at your local bookstore. If you order a copy, please let me know what you like or don't like.