Cut Away (Arktoi Books)

Writer Catherine Kirkwood will read from and sign her first novel, Cut Away.

Catherine Kirkwood holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard University, a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, England, and a BS in psychobiology. Her work has appeared in the Pitkin Review, and in the fiction anthology Under the Flesh of Oranges. Her acclaimed feminist work, Leaving Abusive Partners, has been translated and sold internationally. Cut Away is her debut novel. Born in Los Angeles, she grew up in a family that held science—physics and math—as the main form of faith, but her mother firmly believed in the power of wonder that resides in nature. She took her into the back-country as soon as she could walk and taught her never to be afraid of the urge to go deep into the wilderness, to always trust her instincts in finding her path. Catherine now lives in Seattle in a small, yellow cottage with her partner, a border collie mix, and two geriatric cats. When she’s not writing, she works as a systems analyst in cancer research.

Cut Away (Paperback)

By Catherine Kirkwood

$16.95

ISBN-13: 9780980040791
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Arktoi, 4/2010

Cut Away is a novel that expertly entwines the lives of three characters struggling to understand the meaning of identity and its seeming mutability. Orbiting around the mystery of a missing teenager, a trio of narrators each tells her story in turn. Alexandra is a transgendered woman who has refused surgery and abandoned Los Angeles for a trailer at the desolate Salton Sea. Asa, the mother of the runaway, wants her grief-ridden face completely transformed. Eleanor, a plastic surgeon, is fascinated with surfaces and wonders whether visual harmony has the power to change what lies beneath. In a culture obsessed with transforming the body, do the incarnate fictions we create have the power to hide or reveal the truth of who we really are? This is a question that Catherine Kirkwood approaches in a stunning debut novel of desire, self-loathing, and the revisionary madness of our modern world.

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