Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Music
Weblink
www.taraison.com

REELING THROUGH LIFE

Tara Ison

How I Learned To Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Tara Ison explores how film shapes identity.

She looks at how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, shaped and molded who she has become and taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love. Ison examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style. She posits that cinema is the most engaging form of art—a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities.

Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List, A Child Out of Alcatraz and Rockaway. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies.

Available products
Book Published 2015-01-01 by Soft Skull
Book Published 2015-01-01 by Soft Skull

Comments

Confessional, honest, and humorous, Reeling Through Life is an engrossing memoir and a guide to essential film, albeit one with plenty of spoilers.

Like a great film retrospective, Ison’s gorgeous essays flicker and dazzle with nostalgia; her shimmering prose and astute, provocative insights surprise and delight. But it’s in her courage to rack focus, turning her personal life inside-out, that she elevates this book into a profoundly moving, revelatory whole.

...innovative, absorbine, intellectually razor-sharp and poetic... brilliant analysis and food for thought for film aficionados and casual fans alike.

[B]reathless and impassioned, Ison shows how and when her favorite on-screen characters and stories synchronized with her own life, or, more often than not, failed to do so. It’s possible that film buffs may not appreciate her breezy approach to cinematic history, but I found it delightful. Rather than a seminar, Ison’s book has the feel of a dinner party, where the hostess tries out voices, does impressions, acts out whole scenes and plots. Read more...

Essential and completely identifiable reading for any film lover. Tara Ison writes about movies and life the way Stephen King can write about horror —with an encyclopedic knowledge of both.

In Reeling Through Life, Tara Ison fashions a marvelous alchemy, giving cinematic sweep to the challenges in her life —some of them recognizable and very funny, some of them not and damned hard —while finding instructive nuggets in an array of iconic films to help make sense of the daily stuff we'd like to leave, if only we could, on the cutting room floor. The result is a brave yet buoyant personal story, told with grace and wit and not a hint of self-pity.

Tara Ison's Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies is unforgettable – a must read for anyone who loves movies. In an exquisite blend of memoir, criticism, and cultural observation, this luminous collection engages readers' hearts, minds, and intellect the way that only the best movies – and the best storytellers – can. Ison masterfully showcases how movies shape and guide us; how they move and empower and embolden us; how they help us learn how to be, above all, human.

Tara Ison’s essays and Patton Oswalt’s memoir offer personal accounts of intense movie fandom. Read more...

Tara Ison's Reeling Through Life is the most enjoyable, intelligent, sharp-eyed, and intensely personal account I've ever read of how movies help to make us who we are. It's as stirring as Norma Rae's union sign, as seductive as Mrs. Robinson's leopard-skin coat.

This is well written, absorbing, and thought provoking, with a highly creative approach to memoir and also to film as it relates to our collective culture.

Tara Ison's passion for the movies shines in every essay in Reeling Through Life, as she gleans life lessons from the movies she's fallen in love with. By turns hilarious, poignant, and outrageous; always profound and beautifully written.