Bøger af Rebecca Mark

How does a young woman's life unfold when she walks in on her husband not once, but twice, in bed with other women? While Emma Aspen White wants to have a meaningful life and career, she has long known that her collegiate aspiration is a Mrs. Degree. She believes that she has achieved that with her first love, Dr. Marc White. However, when that marriage ends, Emma's journey over the next forty-some years, provides plenty of drama.Born in 1955 in Des Moines, Iowa, Emma begins her story at age thirteen when she decides to spend her freshman year of high school at Rosedale, a boarding school in Massachusetts. She concludes her narrative in June 2021 when, at almost sixty-six years old, she is contemplating her life and her competency as a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. During these many years, Emma recounts the times she has with the four great loves of her life: her ex-husband Marc; Scott Olson, the man who helps her rear her son; her former professor, the libidinous poet Garnett de Vere; and Michael FitzRobert, the self-made millionaire with whom she hopes to spend the rest of her life.In addition to recounting her time with these four men as well as other romantic escapades, Emma also shares her relationships to her parents, Henry and Elizabeth Aspen; her counselors, Dr. Agatha Harbrace and Dr. Leah Friedmann; and her three closest friends: her rich Rosedale roommate Penny Porter; her high school friend, the feisty feminist Ginny Wheelock; and her sorority sister, Sara Keatson Woodley. However, the prime relationship Emma has is with her adopted son Peter, a relationship that, over forty years, generates both happiness and heartache.As the eventual owner of a real estate agency, Emma is an upper-middle class white woman who spends most of her life in Iowa. Perhaps what makes Emma so likeable is that she is inordinately beautiful, fairly honest about her character flaws, smart, compassionate, and hopeful. But she does make mistakes. In October 2007, at their 30th college reunion, Emma is alone with Marc, and both of them--naked!-- reveal so much about themselves in a dramatic scene. The next time they are alone occurs in 2021 when, as grandparents, they are in the Illinois kitchen of their son Peter and his wife Ellie. And once again, so much is revealed.In June 2021, Emma meets a young woman, Pamela Jennison, while in the New York apartment of her old friend Penny. As Emma talks with Penny's niece Pamela, Emma demonstrates some of her strongest traits--her abilities to glean information about another human being, to empathize, to celebrate the commonalities of the human condition. Her former lover Garnett, the poet fond of alliteration, who had considered Emma his muse, had nicknamed her his "Glamorous Gleaner." At the end of Emma and Pamela's conversation, there is a surprise, a surprise that even Emma did not see coming!

The four-month-old baby at the end of Rebecca Mark's first novel, A Calm Round of Hours, is all grown up, living in Chicago, working as an emergency room doctor at Northwestern, and trying to find the love of his life.It's the Monday after Easter in 2014, and this new novel's first-person narrator, Dr. Peter Byron White, has just turned thirty-three. Stopping after work one night in a Lincoln Park bar, he hopes to meet a woman he can take home, but instead he encounters five DePaul seniors, only one of whom he is attracted to. He thinks he will never see Ellie again, but then he chances to run into her one Sunday in May, and she agrees to go out to dinner with him the following Friday.Earlier Peter has learned that his friend-with-benefits co-worker Jennifer no long wants to see him because she has begun a new relationship, so Peter is eager to see Ellie. During dinner that evening, she tells Peter she does not want to talk about her family because of a "hardship" her family is dealing with. Later, back at his condo, Peter tells Ellie all about his family, and after he finishes, he hopes to bed her, but she tells him that she will not sleep with him so early in their relationship; instead, they get to know each other by asking questions, and Peter learns a little about Ellie's college boyfriend Darnell.For their next date, Ellie joins Peter for his volunteer tutoring session and then has dinner with him. Back at Peter's condo, she tells him she wants to get to know him better, so Peter reveals more about his Iowa youth. Although Ellie will not sleep with Peter, they do plan to see each other on May 23rd, but before that day Ellie sends Peter an e-mail saying that she is going to New York over Memorial Day weekend to see Darnell and that she will understand if Peter wants to cancel their date. Although Peter is very disappointed upon learning of Ellie's travel plans, he wants to see her, and so they go to a movie and have dinner, and then, back at his condo, Ellie, with many tears, finally tells Peter about her family's "hardship." After the trauma of hearing that, Peter tells Ellie he cannot sleep with her, but they agree to see each other after she returns from New York.However, another e-mail from Ellie telling Peter that she has re-connected with Darnell and does not want Peter to contact her devastates Peter, but he respects her wishes. During the next several months, Peter dates two different women, Japjit and Bridgette, but he ends his relationships with both.Finally, on his 34th birthday, Peter receives a card from Ellie telling him all about her new life, and after he calls her, they agree to meet for lunch on Friday, May 1, 2015.Will the changes that both Peter and Ellie have made in their lives bring them together at last? Will Peter finally have found the love of his life?An epilogue written a year later, in May 2016, tells the reader everything!

It's December 29, 1977, and recent college grad Sara Keatson is spending a few days at her parents' home. With a job teaching art in an elementary school, Sara is seeking career fulfillment and also romance, but the small Iowa town where she is living does not provide many possibilities. Still, the idealistic, creative Sara dreams about finding her Prince Charming, the man who will steal not only her heart but also her virginity. Moreover, since she is an artist, Sara also clings to the notion that her ideal mate will share her appreciation for art. While life at her parents' home is boringly predictable, Sara remains hopeful about the future, although the next morning she must attend an elderly relative's funeral. That evening Sara remembers life at college, her good friends there, past relationships, and her married sister's recent pregnancy announcement. When and how will Sara find the love of her life?Less than four years later, it's August 23, 1981, and Sara is married, living in Chicago, and working for Marshall Field's. A long flashback, told by first-person narrator Sara, explains how this dramatic change happened, including all the realistic details about falling in love. That August morning, as Sara and her husband look forward to the very first steps toward suburban home ownership and starting a family, a tragic accident beckons them back to Iowa and a bittersweet reunion with college friends. During the drive there, Sara remembers her past relationship with her best friend's husband, and in Iowa she reminisces about two, now very significant, conversations with her newly-deceased friend, one at the time of Sara's own wedding and the other as her sorority sister happily anticipates the arrival of her first child. Faced with the morbid tasks of funeral preparation, Sara and her friends must come to the realization that life is neither long nor fair. With the fate of a parentless baby up for grabs, what decision will Sweet Sara and her decent husband make? Suddenly, Sara's life is anything but a calm round of hours.

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin into dangerous abstraction.Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the collective American memory, but what distinguishes Ersatz America is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history, citizen artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist outside the realm of official language, creating a counter narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human history.