When she was 54, Lisa Knopp’s weight dropped to a number on the scale that she hadn’t seen since seventh grade. The severe food restricting that left her thin and sick when she was 15 and 25 had returned. This time, she was determined to understand the causes of her malady and how she could heal from a condition that is caused by a tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychological, cultural, and spiritual factors. This compelling memoir, at once a food and illness narrative, explores the forces that cause eating disorders and disordered eating, including the link between those conditions in women, middle-aged and older, and the fear of aging and ageism.
Winner of the 2017 Nebraska Book Award for Memoir
2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In this contemplative collection of essays, Lisa Knopp moves out from the prairies of Nebraska and Iowa to encompass a fully developed vision of light, memory, change, separateness, time, symbols, responsibility, and unity. Knopp charts a stimulating course among the individual, community, and culture that removes the boundaries between self and other, allowing one to become fully present in the world. Her keen vision sees beyond the ordinary to illuminate the mysteries and meanings of our personal and natural worlds.
“When I was eleven the world was filled with birds,”writes Lisa Knopp of her girlhood in Burlington, Iowa. Picking up where she left off in her first book, Field of Vision, Knopp knits together sections of her life story through a pattern of images drawn from nature. The most prevalent of these unifying themes are metaphors of flight—birds, wind, moving upward and outward and across the midwestern landscape from Nebraska and Iowa to southern Illinois.
Reminiscent of Thoreau's introspective nature writing and Dillard's taut, personal prose, each chapter in Flight Dreams stands alone as a distinct narrative, yet each is linked by profoundly personal descriptions of dreams, the natural world, defining experiences, and chance encounters with people that later prove to be fateful. Part Eastern meditation, part dream sequence, part historical reconstruction, Flight Dreams testifies to a deep understanding of how the natural world—its visible and invisible elements—guides our destinies.
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