Description: Lamb once again reveals his talent for finding the humanity in the lost and lonely--a group of incarcerated women at the York Correctional Institution where he taught writing. His powerful Introduction describes the incredible process by which these women found their true voices, and how they challenged him as a teacher and as a writer. Photos throughout.
Brief description:
Wally Lamb is the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She's Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin' and Hopin', and We Are Water. His first two works of fiction, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both #1 New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah's Book Club. Lamb edited Couldn't Keep It to Myself, I'll Fly Away, and You Don't Know Me, three volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for two decades. He lives in Connecticut.
Review Quotes:
"The 12 riveting, touching autobiographical accounts [of Couldn't Keep It to Myself] look past the bars to lay bare lives that would normally have gone unheard." - Entertainment Weekly
"Without resorting to pity or braggadocio, the stories detail the authors' early lives, prison experiences, relationships with abusive husbands and partners in heartbreaking, inspiring detail. . . .The stories in Couldn't Keep It to Myself are self-assured, deftly structured, and grippingly paced. Impressively, not one narrative comes across as an excuse or rationalization." - New York Post
"An intriguing and powerful collection." - Publishers Weekly
"The pieces are uniformly wrenching . . . . Yet they are as far from self-pity as possible. There are things, says Lamb, that need 'to be known about prison and prisoners. There are misconceptions to be abandoned, biases to be dropped.' Here's a step in that direction." - Kirkus Reviews
"Lying next to and rising out of despair, hope permeates the book. Why, in the end, does Lamb want us to care about 10 women in prison? Perhaps because in noticing the humanity of others, we become more human ourselves." - Los Angeles Times Book Review