Raccoon Love received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Stephen Akey.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
Raccoon Love, published by Adelaide Books, Dec. 29, 2021.
What’s the book’s first line?
It all ends badly.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Raccoon Love is about intimacy in all its sublime and maddening ordinariness. I think most of us tend to be a bit embarrassed by the ordinariness of our lives. What I’ve tried to do in Raccoon Love and my other memoirs is redeem and reclaim that ordinariness. It’s where we live.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
I’m a memoirist (and essayist), so by definition I write about my life. Some readers will always disdain memoirs as narcissistic exercises in navel-gazing. And yet, you arrive at the universal only through the particular. I believe that the memoir as a form conduces to that universality without the (sometimes) cumbersome contrivances of fiction. To quote Robert Lowell, “Why not say what happened?”
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
I sometimes feel a little guilty about not writing about grand social and political themes, but after all, we engage in the struggle for social and political justice so that we can have the freedom to live our ordinary, messy lives. And the biggest event (short of death) that most of us will ever experience in our ordinary, messy lives is falling in (or out) of love. There’s a reason that millions and millions of books, poems, songs, paintings, plays, movies, TV shows, and even memoirs have been dedicated to that subject. More than anything else, it’s the thing that makes us most fully human.