Wild Ride

An utterly original mix of memoir, astute social observation, and bravura nature writing, this collection of personal essays marks the debut of a writer of extraordinary aplomb and brio. Imagine the literary love child of Joan Didion and Walt Whitman and you have something approaching the heady blend of precision and elegy that is Bia Lowe. Casting a keen and knowing eye on a variety of life's conditions, Lowe takes readers on her minutely observed journeys. Whether she's recounting the natural history of the pigeon or her stint as drummer for The Love Machine, an all-lesbian garage band, her gorgeous, unstintingly honest voice finds the universal in the particular, the sacred in the mundane. Each essay reads like a conversation with an intimate friend: the world is a body to be explored, and Lowe maps it as closely as her own anatomy. An allergic sneeze yields a wide-ranging spray of gemlike observations about psychosomatic illness, the quality of the air in Los Angeles, and our disappointment with the frailties of our bodies. A skunk's trespass in a quiet garden breeds a meditation on the nature of fear, the persistence of memory, and the odor of a lover's infidelity. An essay on blood, the "salty bouillon" in our veins, prompts Lowe on an intimate journey from the "amniotic sea" to her adolescent wrestling with the legacy of her father's alcoholism. Swept along by the momentum of Wild Ride, one can only marvel at the subtlety of her eye, her innate ear for language, and the organic cohesion of this collection as a whole, which completely defies genre. This is virtuosic writing, sure to find a readership as broad as the author's vision.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.