In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds鈥攖o study the surprising moments of communication鈥攁s a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman鈥檚 journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.
Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano鈥檚 beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.
鈥淥n one level, Grammar Lessons is a vivid, compelling meditation on traveling abroad. On another, the author, Michele Morano, uses her travel experience鈥攖he exhilarations and dislocations, the unbidden surprises and disappointments鈥攁s a lens through which she examines more deeply what it means to be human.鈥濃擬ichael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching
Named a 2007 Book to Remember by the New York Public Library
