Just beneath My Skin

This is a beautifully written collection of essays that explores central issues of female identity. With unflinching honesty, Foster takes on the large and emotionally charged topics of class, race, and gender. She makes a strong case for the autobiography—why it is more important than ever in our contemporary world.

* author of The Desert Pilgrim *

Like all good writers, Patricia Foster knows that the best stories are those we carry around inside us. Her art is to hold moments of everyday experience—as daughter, woman, lover, wife; as child at home and as adult returning to childhood territory—up to the light and see what insights can be gleaned from them.

* author of King Leopold's Ghost *

What is remarkable about this collection of fine essays is how often the intense I of autobiography evokes a readerly and me. Foster goes in search of her identity, and plumbs what it is to be southern, to be white, to be a woman, and to be a self.

* author of Embalming Mom: Essays in Life *

A valuable and honest look at one woman’s confrontation with herself in the context of culture, place, and history. It is likewise a treatise, one powerfully demonstrated within the pages of all five memoirs—on the ways that writing about one’s own life can lead to recovery of the past through memory and imagination, as well as to an enlightened understanding of one’s present and the ways it was shaped by that past.

Although writers can feel alone and alienated, Foster seems to have found a place of redemption, where she is at home living beyond the ordinary, which, in turn, infuses her writing with its notable lyricism. Though a lifetime in the making, her story is told with the grace and ease of a ‘yesterday’ discovery.

Intelligent, self-deprecating, warm, and lively, Just beneath My Skin is engaging and thought-provoking.

* Southern Scribe *

Intensely personal essays explore autobiography as a means of creative self-examination. . . . Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight

Filled with moving and humorous anecdotes, as well as with serious considerations of autobiography's aims and methods, Foster's collection is bound together by beautiful prose and unflinching honesty. Clearly, she herself adheres to the advice that she dispenses to her students: 'Writing requires risk.' And it is this sort of truthful scrutiny that extends her collection beyond its apparent subject matter: 'the life of a southern girl who ran away from the South but who, deep in her bones, feels the pull of that history, that story.'