Surviving the Wreck

by Susan Osborn

A woman reflects on her rocky childhood in a pain-ridden family in which the father deviously pursued his daughter, leaving an abandoned mother to pathetically dote on her son to get attention.

226 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

Susan Osborn is the author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, and a wide range of essays, analyses, and interviews. Her last novel, Surviving the Wreck (Henry Holt and Co.), hailed as “a work of genius,” was translated into German and sold widely here and in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. She has been awarded residencies and grants from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Byrdcliffe, Dorset Colony House, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and Rutgers University.

In her recently completed memoir, My Mother's Shoes, Osborn takes a candid and deeply personal look at her mother’s experience as a polio growing up during the 1920s and 1930s. Currents of guilt, longing, and forgiveness flow through this narrative as the author simultaneously explores the ways her mother’s deformity and emotional scars distorted her sense of herself, disfigured their relationship, and affected the narrator’s ability to love herself and others. Written with a fine literary hand and unswerving honesty, this brave and loving account vividly illuminates core identity issues of mothers and daughters with intelligence and compassion.

Osborn is a frequent reader and speaker at colleges, writing conferences, and literary festivals across the country as well as in Europe. Most recently, she was a guest speaker and reader at the Trevor/Bowen Literary Festival in Ireland and the Universität Basel. She also served as books editor for The Vassar Quarterly for over ten years. A gifted workshop facilitator, she has been invited to conduct workshops and teacher-training programs at a wide range of events, including women's writing organizations and educational programs. Osborn also played a seminal role in the inception and development of The Cork Writers’ School.

Osborn received her A.B. from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in Modern British Literature with a specialization in Composition and Rhetoric from Rutgers University. She currently works as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.