Radical: A Life of My Own

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"From NBCC-winning author of Nine Continents Xiaolu Guo, Radical is a playful, provocative memoir of a trip to New York that upended her sense of self as a woman, partner, mother, and artist. In the autumn of 2019, Xiaolu Guo traveled to New York to take up a visiting professorship for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatened her sense of identity and threw her into a crisis-of meaning, desire, obligation, and selfhood. This is a book about separation-by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. At once a memoir, a lexicon, and an ardent love letter, Radical is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between"--