My Life as a Silent Movie

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Narrated by Rosemary Benson

Available from Audible

Book published by Indiana University Press

After losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident, 42-year-old Emma flies to Paris, discovers she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. A story about identity and the shaping function of art, My Life as a Silent Movie presents a vividly rendered world and poses provocative questions on the relationship of art to life.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is author of 12 books including Brazil, winner of the Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Award; the poetry collection Cinema Muto, winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; and The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin.

REVIEWS:

“In this sharply drawn chronicle of grief, a woman reassembles her identity through her father’s art and her brother’s tenuous offer of a new life.... Kercheval delves deeply into the rawest of emotions and the most wrenching of choices, richly detailing each twist and turn with grace.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Kercheval ... blends fiction with fact in this often tense page turner. The book’s energy is by turns bleak and frenetic, and Kercheval deftly draws the reader in to Emma’s search for identity.... she delivers a compelling rumination on family and the losses that we often consider unimaginable.”

—Wisconsin State Journal

“In this finely-wrought odyssey of reconstructing a life while tracing birth parents, Kercheval's prose reads like woof scuttling feverishly to fill in the warp.”

—NUVO