From the discovery of the authorโs face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from โone of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working todayโ (Elizabeth Gilbert).
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusionโa scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from Californiaโs deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and moreโall with a deep conviction that itโs our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.
Mooallemโs powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing โas much art as it is journalism,โ and Jia Tolentino has praised his โgrace and command.โ In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?