How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays

How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays 
available October, 2023

"The cover of Kelle Groom's latest book, How to Live (Tupelo Press, 2023) demurely suggests that it is "A Memoir-in-Essays." But once you enter the vast interior of her attention, you discover that you are in a realm rarely navigated in either form."

"But let's look now at the writing itself, which is the treasure of this book I open at random (knowing I'll be thrilled on any page)"

"Groom displays an untrammeled freedom to utilize an astonishing variety of sentence structure."

"The book of essays traces a seemingly peripatetic existance from residencies to rentals, including bouts of homelessness and visits to the beloved houses, sold and dissolved - ranging up and down the East coast from Florida to Cape Cod, and far west to Las Vegas, Wyoming and California, from mountain top to sea level. Throughout, the writing grapples with the loss of her infant son, addiction and recovery, solitude and encounter, and always a total engagement with what she encounters. At one point she claims, "Each person is a flame I stare into." Searingly, she seeks." "I was struck repeatedly by the full heartedness with which she observes the contours of her visitations. Would we readers really want her to stop arriving on unfamiliar roads, at new places and into alien rooms, each of which she generates with heart-stopping fidelity? Is this, in fact, not living at its most attentive and alive - "

"And who else lets us in with such apparent transparency, in language that hops and floats and gambols, trusting the punch of a fragment where necessary and the ribbon of sentences when appropriate. Though she speaks compellingly of fear, she also seems fearless, as she lingers in transitory dwellings describing them in such striking language that we alight with her.”

— Rebecca Kaiser Gibson's review of How to Live in Tupelo Quarterly #30, July 30, 2023
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