- 242 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Under My Bed and Other Essays
About This Book
Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father? Keisner's fears mature as she becomes a wife and mother, and the boogeyman under the bed shape-shifts, though its shapes are no less frighteningâa young aunt's drowning, the "chest chomp" in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother's belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: "Don't be afraid." 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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Part 1
- Under My Bed
- Recreationally Terrified
- Fracture
- The Secret of Water
- Firebreaks
- Haunted
- Part 2
- The Maternal Lizard Brain
- Neural Pathways to Love
- Body Language
- Side Effects
- Part 3
- My Grandmother and the Sleeping Prophet
- In-Between
- Runaway Daughter
- Woman Running Alone
- Gratitude
- Selected Bibliography
- About Jody Keisner
- Series List