The Object Parade

“A rich, poignant homage to, quite literally, the stuff of life.” —Meghan Daum This collection of interconnected essays asks: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell? In recalling her own experience, Dinah Lenney’s essays each begin with one thing—real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth’s love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream. Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of raising a family; of coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with upended notions about home and career and aging. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time. “A reflective and candid look at the connection between sentiment and necessity.” —Booklist “A poignant reminder of the way certain objects around us shape our lives and become a touchstone for our personal memories.” —Fast Company