I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

First, a portrait, both harrowing and humorous, of a Midwest boyhood summer under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. Later, he spends a decade in the arctic as a translator of Inuit tales and a student of birds. In Eskimo Point, translating the tale of a soapstone carver turned into a goose (whose migration-time lament is “I HATE TO LEAVE THIS BEAUTIFUL PLACE”), news comes over the radio that “John Lennon is dead.” Twenty years later, another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide, when Norman and his wife loan their DC home to a poet and her young son. But there is solace, too. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse, Norman writes, “Everything I love most happens most every day.”

A memoir of the most confounding, creative, and redemptive reaches of the psyche, from the author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter.