Rosellen Brown Views
Rosellen Brown's characters:mdash;adults, teenagers, and children alikenmdash;are living on the edge, from the beginning to the end of her novels. These works start from the premise of lost innocence and move through the various permutations of damage that the condition wreaks upon the psyches of sensitive individuals. All of Brown's fictional marriages are in one stage or another of breakdown; most of her adolescents are experiencing extreme forms of alienation; all of her characters experience the cruel contingency of fate in the form of unhappy coincidence, accident, or death.
The poetry volume, Cora Fry, contains some of the same sentiments and events as the novels, such as a serious accident. This suggests that the writing is closely autobiographical, which is no problem in itself. In general, however, I think that human beings either like the angst of specific other beings or they do not. There are certain kinds of angst, or expressions of it, that we relate to better than others. And some readers may not like angst at all. Reading Rosellen Brown is a highly personal experience; hers isn't the angst for everybody.
Rosellen Brown (born May 12, 1939) is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work, and her novel Before and After was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson.
pld"There are as many kinds of chemistry at work between writers and their subjects as there are between potential lovers,yrd" writes Rosellen Brown, an observation indicative of the passion and insight she brings to the page as a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Keenly interested in how people live their lives, and in how the inner realm meshes with the outer world, Brown is particularly sensitive to the plights of the displaced and the alienated. Her attunement to the ordeals and consequences of loneliness, exile, and disfranchisement is born of her own peripatetic life and her experiences as a Jewish woman living in non-Jewish communities.
Rosellen Brown Images
