Body Geographic

A memoir from the award-winning author of My Lesbian Husband, Barrie Jean Borichs Body Geographic turns personal history into an inspired reflection on the points where place and person intersect, where running away meets running toward, and where dislocation means finding oneself. One coordinate of Borichs story is Chicago, the prototypical Great Lakes port city built by immigrants like her great-grandfather Big Petar, and the other is her own port of immigration, Minneapolis, the combined skylines of these two cities tattooed on Borichs own back. Between Chicago and Minneapolis Borich maps her own Midwest, a true heartland in which she measures the distance between the dreams and realities of her own life, her familys, and her fellow travelers in the endless American migration. Covering rough terrainfrom the hardships of her immigrant ancestors to the travails of her often-drunk young self, longing to be madly awake in the world, from the changing demographics of midwestern cities to the personal transformations of coming out and living as a lesbianBody Geographic is cartography of high literary order, plotting routes, real and imagined, and putting an alternate landscape on the map.