Reviews
"The difficulties and despairs through which she has passed have left Nancy Mairs with unique and moving stories to convey, as well as with a strong voice to tell them."-- New York Times Book Review "Readable and compelling, written with intimacy . . . and a swagger."-- San Francisco Chronicle "[ Plaintext ] will refresh the mind of just about anyone who reads it."-- All Things Considered "[Mairs] scrupulously searches her experience for meaning and bravely bodies it forth in prose. . . . She has the poet's easy access to the unconscious, and the poet's gift for the meaningfully concrete. . . . [ Plaintext ] is astringent, unsentimental, witty, bracing, provocative, often skeptical, often fun."-- Washington Post Book World "There are triumphs here--of will, style, candor, thought, and even form."-- Los Angeles Times "That [ Plaintext ] will change you, that it will strengthen you, I am certain. . . . [Mairs's] prose is stylish, filled with good humor or hot anger."-- Columbus Dispatch "Mairs writes with a candor and intimacy that few in-person conversations could handle. Printed communication is needed for this kind of traffic. And this traffic should not be missed."-- Mobile Press Register "To read Plaintext is like doing some high, hard mountain-climbing with a fearless and experienced guide. Nancy Mairs's unacceptant, insistent re-examination and reevaluation of self, language, and ideas--a central strategy of feminist thought--brings the reader through a series of risks worth taking."--Ursula K. LeGuin "Nancy Mairs's work is original, nervy, and memorable. She writes like a poet, and like a survivor."--Hilma Wolitzer "These essays are not only honest, searingly so, they are witty, immensely readable, and they pay no homage to that imprisoner of female lives, the appropriate."--Carolyn G. Heilbrun "If you delight in language, originality, surprise, honesty, and grit, read this book. You'll come away with whole sheaves of assumptions scattered."--Robert Houston "Like reading a fascinating private journal."-- Kirkus Reviews "These essays tell of the plain moments in an individual woman's life, but they possess a resonance that will strike a universal chord in the minds of all readers."-- Booklist "These essays are brilliant. No feminist, male or female, can afford to miss them."--Carolyn Kizer "The prose is cool and the wit as dry as sundown in Mairs's Arizona desert, the jokes as witty as the bright pink flowers on my spiny cactus."-- Women's Review of Books
