Susanne
Antonetta Susanne
Antonetta was born in Georgia and raised in New Jersey. She
is the author of three collections of poems, including
Bardo, a Brittingham Prize winner. A portion of Body Toxic
was published as an essay entitled "Elizabeth" that was
declared a Notable Essay for 1998 by Best American Essays.
Antonetta lives in Washington state with her husband and
young son. The
Body Toxic An
Environmental Memoir For readers
of A Civil Action and Silent Spring, comes Body Toxic, a
harrowing story of a family, a body, and a
place-among the Pine Barrens of
southern New Jersey, in one of the most environmentally
contaminated counties in the country. Susanne
Antonetta's family were immigrants from Italy on one side
and Barbados on the other. They tried to realize the
American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands
of New Jersey, a place where the rural and industrial
collide. They picked gooseberries along the chain-link fence
of Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant, which ultimately
released more radiation than Three Mile Island. They rowed
dinghies along creeks contaminated with drums of toxic waste
dumped illegally by various chemical companies. At the time,
the young Antonetta and her cousins were obsessed with the
threat of nuclear war, oblivious to what was going on around
them. At first
local officials began to warn people about their wells.
Eventually, parents were asked to donate their children's
baby teeth to be tested for radiation. One by one,
Antonetta's family discovered they had an array of health
problems, and that they were part of a larger pattern of
health problems. Body Toxic
merges the personal and familial with the historical,
political, and environmental, creating a work that is
intensely intimate and starkly political. Brave, harrowing,
beautifully written, Antonetta's memoir explores an American
family in the midst of the wreckage of the American
dream. "[An]
arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the
shadows of the 20th century's most sinister molecules: the
DDT, tritium, chloradane, benzene and plutonium that are now
part of the American landscape.
Antonetta's
considerable achievement in Body Toxic is to devise a
literary voice for the people who live in such places, for
bodies that have been 'charged and reformed by the
landscape' of pollution.
Like any memoirist, Antonetta
is mining her past in the hope of explaining the woman she
became, but in this construction of self, chemistry largely
takes the place of psychology.
What Antonetta has
written is something new-a postpsychological
memoir.
By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you
realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing
notions of science and journalism and even literary
narrative.
Why not construct a childhood from the
influences of loosed electrons and chemicals 'fretted into
our DNA' rather than the stuff a shrink can pry out? Science
has been moving into this territory for some time now;
Antonetta's aim in her 'environmental memoir' is to take
literature there, too. It is a testament to her fearlessness
and talent that she has largely succeeded." -Michael
Pollan, The New York Times Book Review "Bittersweet
and spiked with startlingly poetic descriptions, Antonetta's
compelling blend of family history and musings on crimes
against nature in the nuclear age opens a new chapter in the
literature of place and offers a fresh and poignant look at
the old story of inheritance." -Booklist Counterpoint
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