A mother is a myth, a figure, a body. Through a series of essays spanning the political to the personal, Lucky Bodies reckons with motherhood. Marianne Jay Erhardt's striking debut takes inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers, and what counts as care. Plucking stars from the constellation of stories that have shaped her own emergence as a mother, she explores fables, family, religion, fairy tales, television, mythology, and games, all with exceptional wit and empathy. Erhardt considers the nature of care alongside Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, and Little House on the Prairie. She reassembles memory with Busby Berkely chorus girls, 90's TV commercials, and a mid-Atlantic hurricane. She grieves her father's death and the wreckage of war through Aesop and discovers how little the Mother of God says out loud in The Bible. She reimagines Red Riding Hood's wolf, reflects on faith with Bigfoot and repurposes a Covid wellness survey to take stock of our collective isolation, asking readers, "How alone are you?" Throughout Lucky Bodies, Erhardt establishes herself as a memoiric cultural critic, imagining how we might make and inhabit stories that cultivate an ethic of care.
Marianne Jay Erhardt is the author of Lucky Bodies, winner of the Iron Horse Prize. Her writing appears in Orion, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and teaches writing at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where she lives with her lovely family.
"'The world, hell, hand basket, I'm there' I loved the bracing wit and wry wisdom that animates Lucky Bodies, the way that Marianne Erhardt shines her mind's bright light on motherhood and daughterhood, kinships and performance, stories and myths. An inventively told and beautifully written first book of essays." --Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood "Marianne Jay Erhardt examines our brightly colored world with frankness, generosity, and grace in this collection of essays that is like a fast, fairground ride through American culture, family, love and life. Lucky Bodies is whip smart and, most of all, heartbreakingly real." --Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of French Girl "Marianne Jay Erhardt's Lucky Bodies turns motherhood inside out, wears its pelt like a shawl, unravels it, buries it in snow, then hangs it on the clothesline in the sunshine. In this gorgeous collection, fairy tale and memory are inseparable at last." --Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales
