Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in tweets, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Under My Bed and Other Essays (Nebraska, September 2022) by Jody Keisner.
About the Book:
In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.
A Word from the Author:
I will always remember the moment when, early on during my book tour, I caught the eyes of a young woman who was crying. I’d been reading aloud an excerpt that illustrated my fear of the violence girls and women endure at the hands of men. Afterward, she and I talked, and she shared the ways my book spoke to her experience.
Not all my readings were so dramatic, but I can say unequivocally that the most rewarding thing about publishing Under My Bed has been connecting with readers at in-person and online events and hearing how they found parts of themselves in what I wrote. And isn’t the discovery of universal truth in the personal what we writers of memoir are after?
Publishing this book has also reaffirmed for me that it’s okay to follow the dark corridors of my mind. There is a need and place for women to excavate these darker experiences in their writing and find meaning, beauty, and hope in them.
Reviews:
“Keisner debuts with a riveting essay collection that revisits her painful past. The essays attack difficult material straight on, but Keisner’s smart, clear, and incisive writing cuts deep.” – Publisher’s Weekly
“In fresh and intriguing essays, Keisner’s approaches the subjects of fear and violence against women like an anthropologist: melding the study of human behavior, biology, and the cultural, familial, and social considerations that surround us. And although Keisner’s experiences focus mainly on the woman’s experience, readers of all kinds can find value in the exploration of how, as she writes, “the act of naming fears and working to understand them is empowering.” Because this is a book that’s as much about empowerment as it is fear.” – The Adroit Journal
“Jody Keisner understands both the power and danger of giving outlines and heft to our otherwise amorphous fears. In her luminous new collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Keisner interrogates fear—personal and collective—from one sharp angle after the next, with a special acuity for the fears known best by women and mothers.” – Brevity
“Through all her fears she envisions her daughter running alone, both free and fearful. To me this is the perfect metaphor for being a woman: we want to be free, yet we are held back by our fears. At times those fears seem irrational, yet there is constant news of women being assaulted, abducted, or killed. I recommend this book to women who have experienced, at one time or another, these same anxieties. And isn’t that all of us?” – GXRL
“What we most fear, her writing reminds us, reveals what we most treasure. The greatest triumph of Under My Bed and Other Essays is how masterfully Keisner captures this inescapable tension.” – Hippocampus Magazine
“Under My Bed offers a complex, compelling, and multi-faceted look at the origins of fear, motherhood, and forgiveness.” – MER
“Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays explores the ritualistic aspect of fear, the summoning of anxiety’s ghosts, and what it means to be a woman living under the promise of male violence. Although Keisner speaks truth to power on what it is like to live with anxiety, it is the exploration of fear and her grandmother that ties the themes of womanhood, illness, and survival.” – New Pages Blog
“Keisner does not provide magical answers to exterminate all her readers’ fears—how could she possibly do so? Instead, the resounding comforting message she broadcasts is ‘You are not alone.'” – Split Rock Review
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