New this month from the University of Nebraska Press is Driving with Dvorak, an essay collection by Fleda Brown. This collection examines a broad spectrum of themes: Feminism, education, the treatment of the developmentally disabled in the 1950s and 1960s, and the author’s father’s likely autism. In this guest post, Brown discusses why she decided to write about her father, and how the book came together:

You can track the events in Driving With Dvořák by my father’s age, which I mention in a number of essays. He ages almost ten years during the book. I thought I might change the dates to make the whole seem more immediate, but then, I’d lose the accumulation of evidence. Evidence for what? When I had the essay, “Where You Are,” I knew the answer to this, and I knew then that I had a book, here.

What makes a book, you ask? There are books of utterly disconnected essays, but this one is made up of memoirs. I’d say a memoir-as-book needs to give a sense of progression and of revelation. It needs to track the growth of a mind, its opening and changing. The book isn’t “about” my father, but I could see, as I looked at all the essays, that my own understanding of my life could be mirrored in how I understood my father. Was he crazy or what? Not all the essays feature him, but they push against ideas and obsessions I absorbed from him. Strangely, I think the book honors him.