Mike Ramsey JrNovel
The Backward Becoming
A novel that opens at the far end of a life and turns back toward its beginning.
- Form
- Novel
- Setting
- Calder, Kentucky, 1946–1951 · Dacca, 1972
- Stage
- Drafting; four chapters in advance reading
About the book
The Backward Becoming
In the spring of 1972, an American nurse named Nell Hale is working in a cholera-relief camp outside Dacca. The novel opens there, at the far end of a life, on an afternoon that does not go the way the day was supposed to go.
Then it turns back to Calder, Kentucky — to a chicken pie carried into a front room in 1946, to a tenth birthday the January after, to a July afternoon at the river in 1951 — and works forward through the ordinary days that made her.
The Backward Becoming is a book about what a person is assembled from: a kitchen, a sandbar, the exact way a fork goes around the edge of a crust, and how much of a life turns out to have been decided on afternoons nobody thought to write down.