Many Seasons
By Frances Badalamenti
Many Seasons is a skein, an elaborate tangle unraveling and being rewound. This story and the self inside it must get undone in order to be seen and painstakingly reassembled. Just as personhood is non-linear, in this story, memory mingles with moment and matter-of-factly presents the formidable questions: Are attachments a reward or a burden? Stability or freedom? Independence, or that obvious one: love? Ana, our protagonist, steadily excavates all of this—along with generations of familial patterns, both repeating and interrupting them in her own evolving family. She critiques motherhood while enacting it, she discovers her gender as she observes it through her writing, and questions her relationships while staying in them. Many Seasons is really about being known; coming to terms with the fact that the richest part of us, one’s interior, may go unknown except to itself. And perhaps, in this case, to the page. By keeping her own narrative, Ana makes a record of renewal, of recovery, of domestic labor, of anxiety as a parallel realm. She shows us that healing is a threshold and a path, that selfhood is a grand, nesting landscape, and that much like home, it is a shelter made by effort, devotion.
RIYL: Tove Ditlevsen, Rachel Cusk, going to therapy.
Read an essay by the author about autofiction: A Woman’s Search for Meaning: On Motherhood and Writing the Self.
"A deft simmer of a book, Frances Badalamenti’s Many Seasons is a practice in dailiness. Ana, the book’s narrator, lives a writer’s life, complete with a writer’s challenges, from work-life balance to partnership issues to questions regarding self-worth. What sets Many Seasons apart from so many other books, though, is Ana’s insistence on unrehearsed introspection and examination. There are no happy endings and Ana exists within the framework that life has provided her, while simultaneously looking towards the future and its wealth of possibility. Many Seasons is a necessary text for any writer that studies their internal landscape and wonders, what if ?" —Jeff Alessandrelli, author of And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024)
“In Many Seasons, spare and precise expressions of everyday living become meditations on freedom versus stability, gender, love, safety, motherhood, eco-failure, grief, and learning to self-parent. With a compelling photography series by Aaron Wessling, this book is a beautiful depiction of the quotidian and how small moments accumulate and articulate larger truths. Sad, angry, honest, lovely. Reminiscent of Kate Zambreno’s Drifts but quintessentially Portland, in the best ways. Bike rides, therapy, morning tea, books, rain, records, grassy overlooks, art, unpaved roads, wildflowers, getting stoned and enjoying the view.” —Alissa Hattman, author of Sift (The Third Thing, 2023)
By Frances Badalamenti
Many Seasons is a skein, an elaborate tangle unraveling and being rewound. This story and the self inside it must get undone in order to be seen and painstakingly reassembled. Just as personhood is non-linear, in this story, memory mingles with moment and matter-of-factly presents the formidable questions: Are attachments a reward or a burden? Stability or freedom? Independence, or that obvious one: love? Ana, our protagonist, steadily excavates all of this—along with generations of familial patterns, both repeating and interrupting them in her own evolving family. She critiques motherhood while enacting it, she discovers her gender as she observes it through her writing, and questions her relationships while staying in them. Many Seasons is really about being known; coming to terms with the fact that the richest part of us, one’s interior, may go unknown except to itself. And perhaps, in this case, to the page. By keeping her own narrative, Ana makes a record of renewal, of recovery, of domestic labor, of anxiety as a parallel realm. She shows us that healing is a threshold and a path, that selfhood is a grand, nesting landscape, and that much like home, it is a shelter made by effort, devotion.
RIYL: Tove Ditlevsen, Rachel Cusk, going to therapy.
Read an essay by the author about autofiction: A Woman’s Search for Meaning: On Motherhood and Writing the Self.
"A deft simmer of a book, Frances Badalamenti’s Many Seasons is a practice in dailiness. Ana, the book’s narrator, lives a writer’s life, complete with a writer’s challenges, from work-life balance to partnership issues to questions regarding self-worth. What sets Many Seasons apart from so many other books, though, is Ana’s insistence on unrehearsed introspection and examination. There are no happy endings and Ana exists within the framework that life has provided her, while simultaneously looking towards the future and its wealth of possibility. Many Seasons is a necessary text for any writer that studies their internal landscape and wonders, what if ?" —Jeff Alessandrelli, author of And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024)
“In Many Seasons, spare and precise expressions of everyday living become meditations on freedom versus stability, gender, love, safety, motherhood, eco-failure, grief, and learning to self-parent. With a compelling photography series by Aaron Wessling, this book is a beautiful depiction of the quotidian and how small moments accumulate and articulate larger truths. Sad, angry, honest, lovely. Reminiscent of Kate Zambreno’s Drifts but quintessentially Portland, in the best ways. Bike rides, therapy, morning tea, books, rain, records, grassy overlooks, art, unpaved roads, wildflowers, getting stoned and enjoying the view.” —Alissa Hattman, author of Sift (The Third Thing, 2023)
By Frances Badalamenti
Many Seasons is a skein, an elaborate tangle unraveling and being rewound. This story and the self inside it must get undone in order to be seen and painstakingly reassembled. Just as personhood is non-linear, in this story, memory mingles with moment and matter-of-factly presents the formidable questions: Are attachments a reward or a burden? Stability or freedom? Independence, or that obvious one: love? Ana, our protagonist, steadily excavates all of this—along with generations of familial patterns, both repeating and interrupting them in her own evolving family. She critiques motherhood while enacting it, she discovers her gender as she observes it through her writing, and questions her relationships while staying in them. Many Seasons is really about being known; coming to terms with the fact that the richest part of us, one’s interior, may go unknown except to itself. And perhaps, in this case, to the page. By keeping her own narrative, Ana makes a record of renewal, of recovery, of domestic labor, of anxiety as a parallel realm. She shows us that healing is a threshold and a path, that selfhood is a grand, nesting landscape, and that much like home, it is a shelter made by effort, devotion.
RIYL: Tove Ditlevsen, Rachel Cusk, going to therapy.
Read an essay by the author about autofiction: A Woman’s Search for Meaning: On Motherhood and Writing the Self.
"A deft simmer of a book, Frances Badalamenti’s Many Seasons is a practice in dailiness. Ana, the book’s narrator, lives a writer’s life, complete with a writer’s challenges, from work-life balance to partnership issues to questions regarding self-worth. What sets Many Seasons apart from so many other books, though, is Ana’s insistence on unrehearsed introspection and examination. There are no happy endings and Ana exists within the framework that life has provided her, while simultaneously looking towards the future and its wealth of possibility. Many Seasons is a necessary text for any writer that studies their internal landscape and wonders, what if ?" —Jeff Alessandrelli, author of And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024)
“In Many Seasons, spare and precise expressions of everyday living become meditations on freedom versus stability, gender, love, safety, motherhood, eco-failure, grief, and learning to self-parent. With a compelling photography series by Aaron Wessling, this book is a beautiful depiction of the quotidian and how small moments accumulate and articulate larger truths. Sad, angry, honest, lovely. Reminiscent of Kate Zambreno’s Drifts but quintessentially Portland, in the best ways. Bike rides, therapy, morning tea, books, rain, records, grassy overlooks, art, unpaved roads, wildflowers, getting stoned and enjoying the view.” —Alissa Hattman, author of Sift (The Third Thing, 2023)
Words: Frances Badalamenti
Cover & Photography: Aaron Wessling
Design: Ellen Robinette
Auto fiction. 5.0” x 8.0” trade paperback, 148 pages. Full color.
ISBN: 9798990017436
