num_pages: 224
description: Somewhere between Jo Ann Beards The Boys of My Youth and Amy Schumers stand-up exists Kim Addonizios style of storytelling . . . at once biting and vulnerable nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality. Refinery29Always vital clever and seductive Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham.  BooklistA dazzling edgy laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing drinking dating and more Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories she has encountered success along with one critic dismissed her as Charles Bukowski in a sundress. (Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu? she muses.) Now in this utterly original memoir in essays she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age. Addonizio vividly captures moments of inspiration at the writing desk (or bed) and adventures on the roadfrom a champagne-and-vodka-fueled one-night stand at a writing conference to sparsely attended readings at remote Midwestern colleges. Her crackling unfiltered wit brings colorful life to pieces like What Writers Do All Day How to Fall for a Younger Man and Necrophilia (that is sexual attraction to men who are dead inside). And she turns a tender yet still comic eye to her her father who sparked her love of poetry; her mother a former tennis champion who struggled through Parkinsons at the end of her life; and her daughter who at a young age chanced upon some erotica she had written for Penthouse . At once intimate and outrageous Addonizios memoir radiates all the wit and heartbreak and ever-sexy grittiness that her fans have come to loveand that new readers will not soon forget.
language: English
title: Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life
publisher: Penguin Books