She’s very funny in real life but on the page, there’s usually an austerity there, and here, the lightness felt new.” She was being self-deprecating, but I could tell the inquiries went deep. “Eula said she was writing prose poems on capitalism. Her husband, a real estate agent, sold Biss her home.
Sara Levine, a novelist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago writing professor, read a very early version of the essays collected in the book. But then the book spirals outward, into dozens of brief essays, toward both the quotidian and foundational, touching on tea and IKEA catalogs, capitalism, Monopoly, feudalism and fireworks.
It began as a diary that Biss kept to record her contradictory feelings of elation and hesitation, at finally having a sense of security yet knowing that if she didn’t write down her thoughts, her good fortune would be taken for granted and she would eventually forget her newfound sense of solidity. But most of the book is actually about the physical, cultural and psychological baggage that comes with home ownership. “Having and Being Had” is, at a glance, about buying a house in Evanston. There was fearlessness there, because Eula has a firm belief that white people need to talk about race publicly - that they need to risk something.” Yet Eula, she spoke with poise about race.
“‘Notes’ came out a year earlier, there was so much in it on being white, making a life in Chicago, and now, oh she’s sharing the event with Toni Morrison, who is being interviewed by no less than Oprah. But the Literary Award that night went to Toni Morrison. Biss was getting the 21st Century Award for an emerging author of promise. Jeff Shotts, executive editor at Graywolf Press, worked with Biss on “On Immunity” and “Notes From No Man’s Land.” He recalled attending the Carl Sandburg Literary Awards with her in 2010, given annually by the Chicago Public Library.
While two-year-olds take bullets in other parts of the city, I worry over the danger embedded in the paint that chips off my child’s toys and the walls around him.” “It is both a luxury and a hazard to feel threatened by the invisible,” she wrote about sickness in “On Immunity.” “In Chicago, where 677 children were shot the year after my son was born, I still somehow managed to find myself more captivated by less tangible threats. She kept a diary about buying the home in 2014, which became her latest book. Essayist Eula Biss in her Evanston backyard on Aug.
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