Paradise, Piece by Piece

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Part fact and part fiction, this memoir by award-winning poet Molly
Peacock chronicles, with much humor and candor, her rocky childhood in
Buffalo and her struggles, as an adult, to achieve stability in her
life.

At the age of 3, Peacock decided that she would never have children. In
later years, her childhood vow would be put to the test on more than one
occasion. Peacock grew up with an alcoholic father, an eccentric mother,
a volatile younger sister, and a grandmother who would sometimes say,
“[w]rite me a poem.” Eventually she escaped to a college in New
York, became a teacher, and started publishing her poems. In her
dealings with family, students, and lovers, this woman who pined for a
life lived alone unwittingly took on the role of mother. After her first
marriage, she began to lose her identity as a poet. Happily, her second
marriage (which finds her in London, Ontario, where her husband works)
has been a union of stability and balance. This story of a woman who
chose art over children is, in the end, a story of family.