In the Rhododendrons
‘IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It’s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners’ Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
On a recent visit to Kew Gardens, Heather Christle’s mother revealed a shocking secret from her past: she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather’s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
Her British mother’s revelation – a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship – propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother’s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family’s ‘birthday hill’ in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Virginia Woolf – both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page – and her writings constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story. Woolf becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.
When Heather Christle realises that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
On a recent visit to Kew Gardens, Heather Christle’s mother revealed a shocking secret from her past: she had been sexually assaulted as a young girl growing up in London, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather’s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
Her British mother’s revelation – a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship – propels Christle down a deep and destabilising rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother’s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family’s ‘birthday hill’ in Kew Gardens, the tourist-ified homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Virginia Woolf – both famously depressed in life and exuberant on the page – and her writings constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story. Woolf becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. It is also a book unlike any other, and one that will send readers down rabbit holes of their own.
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Reviews
I first fell in love with Heather Christle's writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle's narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift
Christle's exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: "There is a difference between bones and a book," she writes, "but both have at their center a spine." What results is irreducibly human. IN THE RHODODENDRONS is vital consolation, amidst the amidst. It's a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art's most urgent living practitioners