Awake with Asashoryu: and other essays

At the heart of every essay in Elisabeth Sharp McKetta’s quiet, luminous collection is a question: how does one grow up without losing oneself? Writing somewhere between myth and memoir, McKetta braids the deceptively simple stories of her own life with the rich undercurrent of familiar childhood tales to reveal something both personal and universal, and as close to the truth as possible. Whether she is spending sleepless nights watching the Japanese sumo wrestler Asashoryu with her also-awake father or settling into a new life in a fishing hamlet in Cornwall, struggling with a beloved and ultimately untrainable corgi named Goblin or on a disastrous dinner date with a boyfriend thirty years her senior, McKetta’s essays sparkle with life and twist round and about: funny and insightful and compelling.