Sure, there's no place like home-but what if you can't really pinpoint where home is? By the time she was nine, Tracy Seeley had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. Her father's dreams of movie stardom, stoked by a series of affairs, kept the family on edge, and on the move, until he up and left. Thirty years later, settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Seeley to her roots-roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home. Seeley finds herself in a Kansas that defies memory, a place far more complex and elusive than the sum of its cultural myths. On back roads and in her many back years, Seeley also finds unexpected forgiveness for her errant father, and, in the face of mortality, a sense of what it means to be rooted in place, to dwell deeply in the only life we have.
Tracy Seeley is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco.
Prelude Chapter One: Thresholds Part One: Going Back Chapter Two: The Good Land Chapter Three: Amazing Grace Chapter Four: The Known World Chapter Five: Wichita Vortex Redux Part Two: Widening the Circle Chapter Six: Kansas Becomes Me Chapter Seven: Sacred Bundles, Secret Maps Chapter Eight: What the Prairie Teaches Part Three: Coming Home Chapter Nine: Matfield Green Coda, 2008 Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography
Seeley's exploration of the Kansas of her youth and adulthood in her search for a feeling of home.
"Under Tracy Seeley's cool, clear gaze, the fractured landscape of America's rootlessness is seen whole again. She reminds us that place is both on the horizon and within our memories... My Ruby Slippers is a complete pleasure to read." - Lewis Buzbee, author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop "Ad astra per aspera. To the stars through difficulty is the Kansas state motto. Tracy Seeley's My Ruby Slippers takes us on a knockabout journey to Dorothy territory, but when she awakens in sunflowers, she's not home. An honest inquiry into who we are wherever we are, and a brave meditation on mortality. A wonderful book." - Terese Svoboda, author of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent "Tracy Seeley's My Ruby Slippers offers a graceful journey into the secret worlds of grief, illness, and, ultimately, recovery. This is a wonderfully vivid and compassionate book, reminding us of how place can shape us and make us whole again." - Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire "There is a sensitivity and patience and persistent thoughtfulness in Tracy Seeley's prose that makes her memoir unique to this cultural moment. In her capable hands we are in no hurry to get anywhere, but happy to follow her lead down every digressive and revelatory path." - Phillip Lopate, author of Getting Personal: Selected Essays
