In October 2010, I visited authors Diane Ackerman and Paul West at their upstate New York home, where we spent two days talking about Diane’s forthcoming book. Several early readers had called it her best to date; without question, it’s the most personal, affecting work of her career.
Six years earlier, Ackerman had been on tour, promoting her twentieth book, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, when her husband suffered a vicious stroke that stole not only his capacity to speak and write but also his ability to decipher language and symbols of all kinds. Global aphasia, the condition is called. Should Diane count it as a blessing or a curse that she’d spent the previous years studying—and celebrating!—the delicate intricacies of the brain?
Before his stroke, Paul had published more than forty books: novels, stories, poems, and a wealth of nonfiction. He’d been a professor of writing and literature at Penn State when Diane enrolled in his Contemporary British Literature course. That was in the early seventies. Their relationship thrived on a shared love for wordplay from the start.
Despite the frightful event that initiates its action, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing is no simple, tragic tale. Paul does recover. Within several years, incredibly, he’s writing books again. As Donna Seaman noted in a starred Booklist review, from these challenging times Ackerman manages to create “a gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny, and mind-opening love story of crisis, determination, creativity, and repair.”
On the day of the book’s publication, we’re proud to present two videos, both constructed out of that October visit. First, the official trailer. And next, Diane’s short introduction to the “one hundred names” referenced in the book’s title.
Visiting the new and improved ReadRollShow studio this week, Camilla Lackberg (The Ice Princess), and a two-for-one with Aryn Kyle (Boys and Girls Like You and Me) and David Goodwillie (American Subversive). Stay tuned for details.
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More Diane Ackerman
DianeAckerman.com (official website)
One Hundred Names for Love: Look inside the book
“The Husband’s Speech” (NY Times Magazine)
PRX interview (audio, 2008)
Powells.com Interview (2007)
FORA.tv interview (video)
Barnes & Noble “Meet the Writers” (audio)
“One Book: San Diego” interview (video)
January Magazine interview (1999)
Selected Quotes
Wordstock is a year-round Oregon nonprofit that works to promote writing in the classroom. And once a year, the
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Perhaps of interest:
http://maximumfiction.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/this-is-not-a-book-review-diane-ackerman%E2%80%99s-one-hundred-names-for-love/