Second Chance: My Life in Things - cover image

Copyright

Ruth Rosengarten

Published On

2022-08-23

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80064-374-1
Hardback978-1-80064-375-8
PDF978-1-80064-376-5
HTML978-1-80064-670-4
XML978-1-80064-379-6
EPUB978-1-80064-377-2
AZW3978-1-80064-378-9

Language

  • English

Print Length

292 pages (xi+281)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 20 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.79" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 23 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.91" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback558g (19.68oz)
Hardback731g (25.79oz)

Media

Illustrations39

OCLC Number

1343160811

LCCN

2021386017

BIC

  • BG
  • JMRM
  • JFCD
  • AGB
  • AJB
  • DSA

BISAC

  • BIO000000
  • BIO022000
  • BIO001000
  • ART065000
  • PHO011010

LCC

  • N6797.R5765

Keywords

  • evocative objects
  • memories
  • materiality
  • loss
  • migration
  • childless woman

Second Chance

My Life in Things

  • Ruth Rosengarten (author)
In this intimate memoir, Ruth Rosengarten explores the subject of evocative objects through a series of interconnected essays.

Evocative objects reflect our attitudes to our own lives and how we seek to display ourselves to ourselves. They are therefore, closely linked to our memories, and how we filter, process and reconstruct them. Rosengarten explores the themes and associations invoked by her own evocative objects, which are frequently shabby things of no material value. They are, importantly, often objects that, in their materiality, bear traces of actions, of something-having-been. Through the associative pathways that these objects have paved, she discusses her experiences with the losses she has undergone, her family’s migrations, and what it means to be a childless woman. This leads her to address the question of what will become of her storied objects and the memories attached to them when she is no longer in existence.

This memoir offers an interdisciplinary approach to collecting and compiling fragments of one’s life, paying close attention to the evocative objects that embody us. In doing so, these essays explore loss, memory, childlessness, longing, family history, literature and art theory through material entities which reveal the immaterial ‘things’ at the heart of this study. This book is sure to be of interest to anyone stimulated by memory work and the relationship between humans and their possessions.

Endorsements

Photographs, shopping lists, cigarette lighters, locks of hair, glasses, dentures— the stuff of a life lived and remembered across the times and spaces of exile and migration. Second Chance invites us to go back to the things we have saved, enriched by Rosengarten’s deep reflections on our lives with things.

Marianne Hirsch

Author of 'The Generation of Postmemory'

Contents

Situating

(pp. 1–22)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Hair

(pp. 23–46)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Orphaned

(pp. 47–66)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Abject

(pp. 67–76)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Nature

(pp. 77–92)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Album

(pp. 93–110)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Photograph

(pp. 111–132)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

List

(pp. 133–146)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Stain

(pp. 147–164)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Unforgotten

(pp. 165–180)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Time

(pp. 181–192)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Studio

(pp. 193–202)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Still

(pp. 203–220)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Happiness

(pp. 221–232)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Lost

(pp. 233–242)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Hair

(pp. 243–253)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Afterword

(pp. 254–257)
  • Ruth Rosengarten

Contributors

Ruth Rosengarten

(author)