New Work by Peggy Shinner

A new essay by alumna Peggy Shinner (fiction, ’94) appears online at Salon:

Don’t slouch, young lady

(excerpted and adapted  from “You Feel So Mortal/Essays on the Body”)

I was a Dr. Spock baby.  My mother kept “The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care” in the end table next to the couch in the living room, where I found it once when I was looking through drawers for evidence of family secrets, a favorite childhood pastime, and where it remained until two years after her death, when my father finally decided to sell the house and move to an apartment. Periodically I would take out the book and idly flip through the pages. What did it tell me about my mother, or my mother about her children? My mother, a binge eater, insecure cook, sharp dresser and the family ledger-keeper and handyperson, who often seemed daunted by the rigors of raising children. She died in her mid-50s, a woman about whom you might have predicted an early death, perhaps because she seemed afraid of life and gave off a persistent whiff of unhappiness. “Use the Index at the back when you are troubled,” Dr. Spock suggested, and I imagine her folded in the corner of the couch, legs under her housecoat, a Marlboro in the ashtray on the end table. It was late at night. My father was snoring ballistically from the bedroom. The house seemed to be ticking with worry.

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