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Summary
Summary
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March pick
A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book
In this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaning
When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she--much to her own confusion--lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé."
A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" ( Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?
Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author's past and present preoccupations.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Debut author Kisner explores the religious, emotional, and cultural underpinnings of contemporary U.S. society in a neatly poised, sympathetic, and refreshingly unpreachy collection of 13 essays. With the comforting presence of an open-minded, deeply curious narrator, Kisner attempts to come to grips with some of the stubborn mental habits of modern Americans: an inability to accept death, a penchant for piousness, and a damaging insistence on whiteness as the norm. Her essays--about medical examiners, young evangelicals, and a border-town debutante ball, among other topics--are sharpest when Kisner explores distinctions of inside and outside. Those moments stand out especially when Kisner deconstructs attitudes toward the body: "Americans' unwillingness to prioritize how we deal with the dead... may constitute a failure of moral imagination, but it absolutely fails to imagine the way the living and the dead remain connected, no matter how the living feel about it," Kisner writes, reflecting on the role of coroners. The prose throughout is by turns lyric and clear, meditative and reportorial--a combination that suits the equal importance she puts on search and on meaning itself. It's that value proposition that creates the overarching pull of the book, whose essays are as entertaining as they are eye-opening. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
In her forthright first essay collection, Kisner explores a variety of topics, from adolescence to mental health, relationships, and religion. With "Attunement," Kisner looks back on her involvement with conventional Christianity during her formative years as well as her departure from belief soon thereafter. "Jesus Raves" follows the efforts associated with a new church, led by an attractive, charismatic couple, as the congregation attempts to establish their presence during a hard-partying Montauk summer. Many of Kisner's works reverberate with the unease of the unknown, blending experiences both visceral and existential. The title piece opens with an imagined composite study of a neurosurgical procedure and further evolves into Kisner's personal struggles with OCD during her teenage years. In the standout, "Habitus," Kisner travels to Laredo, a border town, for a debutante ball that unravels into a complicated exploration of both present-day cultural complexities and her family's past. Written with resilience and candor, Kisner's essays offer genuine examination of the realities of here and now and life's universal paradoxes.