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In the Rhododendrons

A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf

New Release
In the Rhododendrons Open the full-size image

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By Heather Christle

Formats and Prices

Price

$27.00

Price

$35.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $27.00 $35.00 CAD
  2. ebook $12.99 $16.99 CAD
  3. Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99

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For readers of Also a Poet, Orwell’s Roses, and My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers—as well as the legions of Virginia Woolf fanatics—the acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Book crafts a deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing.

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with.
 
On a recent visit to London’s Kew Gardens, Christle’s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather’s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager.
 
Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother’s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family’s “birthday hill” in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
 
Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.

Genre:

  • Named a Best/Most Recommended Book of the Season/Year by Town & Country, Chicago Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, The Millions, Literary Hub, and Daily Kos
  • "Christle’s exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: 'There is a difference between bones and a book,' she writes, 'but both have at their center a spine.' What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation. It’s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners."
    Kaveh Akbar, New York Times-bestselling author of Martyr!
  • “I first fell in love with Heather Christle’s writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle’s narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift.”
    Jessamine Chan, New York Times-bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers
  • “For lovers of Virginia Woolf and nonfiction, you don’t want to miss In the Rhododendrons… Christie ties together these three narratives like a finely built nest to illuminate key moments in each life. In the Rhododendrons has us wondering why every memoir doesn’t include more conversation about Virginia Woolf.”
    Chicago Review of Books
  • “In the Rhododendrons is an emotional memoir that also serves as an individual intellectual history, moving between generalizations about what poets love and how people are and highly specific scenes of (dis)connection, (un)realization, and the Wo(o)lf that guides.”
    Poetry Northwest's Favorite Books for Spring
  • “The precise observations and playful juxtapositions Christle deploys in her poetry, and the fusion of personal revelation with wide-ranging research she performs in The Crying Book, return to make In the Rhododendrons a moving and fascinating exploration both of her own life and of the process of reading and re-learning the past… a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other… beautiful.”
    Cleveland Review of Books
  • “Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life.”
     
    Patricia Lockwood, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel No One Is Talking About This
  • "In the Rhododendrons is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their parents. Heather Christle unearths the tangled roots that connect mother to daughter, collapsing time and interrogating the limits and strengths of language and memory through personal and family history as well as through Virginia Woolf's life and work. ‘Looking changes what you see,’ Christle writes. Words to live by."
    Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don't Talk About and What My Father and I Don't Talk About
  • "A subtle marvel, this book, so many stories at once and all of them brilliantly told. Christle writes of mothers and motherlands and gardens and empires, of writing and seeing and looking again. And Virginia Woolf! Her haunting of these pages is a startling pleasure and provocation, a summons to read everything—our books, our lives—with the wondrous care Christle brings to each word of In the Rhododendrons."
    Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Undertow
  • “The experience of reading Heather Christle’s hybrid memoir, in which she weaves together threads of trauma shared by herself, her mother’s life, and Virginia Woolf, feels like being in a conversation with a brilliant and deeply curious friend. It’s a knockout.”
    Literary Hub, Monthly Nonfiction Recommendation
  • “Dazzling… With lyrical prose… a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt.”
    Publishers Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW*
  • “Meditative, analytic, and heartfelt... Christle exudes a refreshing approach to imagination—one that involves reconstructing unlikely human connections... Mesmerizing and at times whimsical, this book brings readers on a journey beyond linear time and across continents, all for the sake of finding comfort and beauty in the garden of words.”
    Booklist
  • "Making sense of trauma. Award-winning poet Christle examines her life, her relationship with her mother, and her affinity with Virginia Woolf in a lyrical memoir… to find meaning and coherence in the ‘unknowable parts’ of the past. A sensitive chronicle of pain."
    Kirkus Reviews
  • “Christle writes with a poet’s close attention to language and nature… In the Rhododendrons is a meditative and often beautiful narrative, a reminder that the experiences and words of the writers we love can illuminate our own lives.” 
    BookPage
  • “I was an ardent fan of Christle’s 2019 The Crying Book, and have a feeling her latest—a hybrid memoir that weaves personal narrative together with meditations on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—will bowl me over me yet again.”
    The Millions, "The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview"

On Sale
Apr 15, 2025
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Algonquin Books
ISBN-13
9781643755922

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Heather Christle

About the Author

Heather Christle is the author of The Crying Book (Catapult), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Indie Next selection, and national bestseller that was translated into eight languages, awarded the Georgia Book Award for memoir, and adapted for radio by the BBC. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Christle is also the author of four poetry collections including The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Book Award and was adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Elle, Granta, London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and she was recently the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction.
 

Learn more about this author