144 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations
Biography / Memoir | Literary Criticism / Books & Reading | Mindfulness & Meditation
Love Affair in the Garden of Milton interweaves the private story of a marriage coming apart with readings of John Milton’s poetry and prose. Connected essays chart the chaos of loss and the discovery of how a writer can inhabit our emotional as well as our intellectual selves. Inflected by the principles of mindfulness, Susannah B. Mintz’s memoir explores how we reconstruct ourselves and find our way back to meaning in the aftermath of trauma.
Formally inventive and engaging dynamic philosophical ideas, Love Affair in the Garden of Milton raises questions of forgiveness, desire, identity, grief, and the counterintuitive relevance of literary tradition. This lyric memoir offers readers a sense of partnership, with the author and Milton as companionable guides through the wilds of love and loss.
Susannah B. Mintz is the author or coeditor of several scholarly works about disability culture and representation, life writing, and early modern literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Chronicle, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a professor of English at Skidmore College.
“In Love Affair in the Garden of Milton, Mintz seamlessly maps Milton’s great epic onto the small, craggy contours of private grief. A marriage dissolving, a pet missing, an atheist longing for meaning: all of these struggles find their unique telling through the studious (but never distant) love Mintz exhibits for the great English poet, who is also the focus of her academic life. Add to that her insights into (and at times frustrations with) practicing Buddhism and mindfulness, and you have one of the more nuanced displays of a complex intelligence, at once playful and joyous to read, but dead serious, too. This book exemplifies the rigor, energy, and ranginess that I have come to crave from the best literary nonfiction.”—Chad Davidson, author of Unearth
“In this moving memoir, appeals to the work of John Milton, especially Paradise Lost, become uncanny conduits for managing marital discord. Like an embedded reporter, the bard sings from the front lines of uncoupling and unbelief. Mintz teaches us to read as if our lives were at stake. And they are.”—Ralph James Savarese, author of See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
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