Author Description

"In an uncommon mosaic of fiction and commentary, Mary Porter Engel weaves a story of the conflict between a woman's passionate longing for spirituality and her headlong flight toward the wrong men, drugs, and crippling loneliness. As A Woman of Salt opens, Ruth VanderZicht receives the news from her sister that her mother, a fierce evangelical from whom she has been alienated for years, is dying and has asked to see her. Will she go? Ruth, angry, frantic, about to move into a new house with her husband, and weeks away from giving birth to their first child, resents her mother's request, but is unable to refuse. This dilemma ignites a turmoil of memory and struggle in which she veers between love and anger, sense and insanity, her self and her mother, the world and God. What ensues is a form of dialogue where each story about Ruth and her past is stitched together by a midrash, a narrative exploration of a biblical text that Ruth writes herself and that becomes a kind of commentary on the events of her life.". "From this collision of midrashim and stories that Ruth tells, we learn the circumstances of her life. We learn about the Dutch Calvinist community she was raised in and the burden of religion she experienced as a child; about her youthful rebellion and experiments with drugs; her relationship with her rigid, judgmental mother and weak father; the men who invariably turned cold and abusive. Caught in this tangle and beset by the demons of memory, she is forced to come to terms with herself as a woman in order to survive. As Ruth gradually settles her heart and mind, the distance between her stories and her midrashim dissolves."--BOOK JACKET.