Candid essays on personal and cultural American nostalgia, focusing on the authors working-class, Rust Belt family history.
What does it mean to be nostalgic for the American past? The feeling has been co-opted by the far right ( Make America Great Again, after all, is a plea for the past), and associated with violent periods of our countrys history when white supremacy was even more dominant than today. Can a liberal white woman still be sentimental about her childhood, her European immigrant family history, her working-class upbringing?
InDreadful Sorry, Jennifer Niesslein explores her nostalgia problem with grace and curiosity. The essays recount her thoughts upon rewatchingLittle Womenwith her sisters and mother, her hand-to-mouth childhood, the effect being not the right kind of white had on her Polish immigrant ancestors in the U.S, and her familys own racism. Niesslein weaves together personal and structural questions of class, whiteness, history, and family with humor and charisma.
A book for anyone who wants to think about their relationship to their childhood, family history, and place.
Jennifer Niesslein is the editor ofFull Grown Peopleas well as the editor of twoFull Grown Peopleanthologies. She wrote one memoir,Practically Perfect in Every Way(Putnam, 2007), and co-foundedBrain, Childmagazine. Originally from western Pennsylvania, she lives in Charlottesville.
Consistently charming. --Dorian Fox,Los Angeles Review of Books
In this time of reckoning around race, the past, the present, and the future, Niesslein looks inward, and the result is a candid, unflinching, deeply personal meditation on whiteness, family, and history. These essays are revelatory, raw, and real, everything good storytelling should be. --Deesha Philyaw, author ofThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Niesslein is a nuanced thinker, and she honors the tremenl³R
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