I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

Maxine Hong Kingston

Vintage International, 2012 - Biography & Autobiography - 229 pages

In her singular voice—both humble and brave, touching and humorous—Maxine Hong Kingston gives us a poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse that captures the wisdom that comes with age. As she reflects on her sixty-five years, she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage to her arrest at a peace march in Washington. On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, she revisits her most beloved characters—Wittman Ah-Sing, the Tripmaster Monkey, and Fa Mook Lan, the Woman Warrior—and presents us with a beautiful meditation on China then and now. The result is a marvelous account of an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rmckeown - LibraryThing

An interview with Kingston aired on NPR, and I really wanted to like this verse memoir. A few of her poems had appeared in anthologies over the years, but none of them caused in me any over excitement ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - kidzdoc - LibraryThing

In this fascinating and unforgettable memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston, an award-winning second generation Chinese-American writer and pacifist, shares the story of her past life and the experiences of ...

Contents

• Section 1: 2
• Section 2: 3
• Section 3: 6
• Section 4: 7

About the author

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle award, the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. For many years a Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at UC Berkeley, she lives in Oakland, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: I Love a Broad Margin to My Life; Vintage International
• Author: Maxine Hong Kingston
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Vintage International, 2012
• ISBN: 0307454592, 9780307454591
• Length: 229 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary; Biography & Autobiography / Women; Poetry / American / Asian American