Studio of the Voice

In the essay collection Studio of the Voice, master essayist Marcia Aldrich is at her finest as she invites readers along for a personal exploration of women's lives, the complicated love of mothers for daughters and of daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more, speaking to us always in a voice that is hers alone: revealing, comic, elegiac, perceptive, and wise. The essays take on dazzling forms in this award-winning writer's hands-some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode-each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.

"Like the best essayists, Marcia Aldrich asks tough questions and explores a multitude of possible answers. Some questions lead to new ways of seeing, whether a fresh perspective on a famed portrait of Marilyn Monroe and her fascinating feet, or Jane Fonda's character in the film Klute, or her own mother's thick curling toenails. Other questions lead to self-reckoning, taking the measure of the self's many roles: daughter, mother, young woman, middle-aged woman, lover, wife, swimmer, professor, writer. Under Aldrich's piercing gaze, the voice can be the spoken word, sometimes quiet and stifled, sometimes surprising and provocative--as when she tells male academic colleagues her career has been unlike theirs because of sex. Or the voice can be the written word, carefully crafted in experimental form (abecedarian, diagram, second person) or in classic questioning essay mode. Often, the body becomes a kind of voice, powerful in a fitted blue dress when a broken-down New York City apartment and isolating job at a law firm stifle almost every other aspect of voice. Or when swimming in competition, or refusing to strike a pose that will produce a photograph that says "writer." Sometimes the body slips into a sidestroke, and the writer in a sense becomes her mother, who favored that paradoxical stroke, weak and disqualified from competition, yet lifesaving in preserving energy and allowing a drowning person to be carried ashore. The book probes the spaces of intimacy-the marital bed, the separate beds of the parents, labor pains and birth, a post-menopausal gynecological exam, sex and seduction-marrying and divorcing her college professor, then marrying for life. The book probes the big questions-why she has no birth story, the challenge