Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

by Mary Cappello

 
Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on.
 
This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don’t write that book as a linear progression—you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active , investigation. Or at least you do if you’re as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello.
 
What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its we travel with her from the childhood tables of “arts and crafts” to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us.  The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative.
 
“I’m one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood,” Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you’re one of Mary Cappello’s people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.

Genres: Nonfiction

396 pages, Hardcover

Published October 21, 2016

About the author

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

Cappello is originally from Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from State University of New York, Buffalo, and her B.A. from Dickinson College. Cappello has taught at the University of Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, and at the University of Rochester.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Cappello evokes thousands of moods in the course of 300 pages as she takes the reader on a journey of memory, sensation, emotions and feelings. Her ideas both meander and run deep. Her words are pedantic on one page and poetic on another. The book is a swirl of the suggestion of mood, a discourse on what it is and examples of how it is projected.

It's an intense experience. After just 50 pages (some of them random), I had to put the book down. I am cooked from too much mood. But that's not a complaint. In the hour or so I spent with the book, I had several excellent ideas for artwork. This is a book you can dip into for a shot of creativity.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully dense. I savored this one. Seeing Cappello’s mind at work is so enriching. It requires time and attention but is so rewarding. She always pushes me to be a better thinker.

[Estep · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one and Swallow are my favorite books by Mary Cappello. Which are among my fave books.