Other Women
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Alther left Tennessee to attend Wellesley College and moved to New York after graduation in 1966 to work in book publishing at Atheneum. During college she met a Cornell co-ed, Richard Alther, whom she later married. Their daughter, Sara, was born in 1968. The family moved to Vermont, where Richard pursued his painting. In the years that followed, Alther began writing journalism pieces, but inspired by the great Southern women writers and storytellers, she also worked on novels. After many rejections, her first novel, Kinflicks was published in 1976 to critical praise and became a bestseller.
Kinflicks was the first of six bestselling novels: The others were Original Sins (1982), Other Women (1984), Bedrock (1990), Birdman and the Dancer (1993), and Five Minutes in Heaven (1995). Alther also taught Southern fiction at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and produced one work of nonfiction, Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree. For Kinfolks (2007), she researched her family’s possible connection to the Melungeon people, a little-known population in eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia whose ethnic origins are unclear but may be traced to Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish sailors who integrated with the Cherokee people in the seventeenth century.
Following her divorce, Alther remained in Vermont, where she has lived now for over thirty years. She has written novels set both in the South and in her adopted northern home, and takes inspiration from both her past and present neighbors and family. Her novels feature a comic wit that addresses human foibles as gracefully as her more serious prose tackles weightier topics such as racism, feminism, domestic abuse, politics, and sexuality. Her work aims “to portray the human reality behind the cultural stereotypes, particularly those regarding women.”
Alther divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
A baby Alther on July 23, 1945, sitting at the edge of Conesus Lake in New York.
Alther in 1948, at age four.
An eight-year-old Alther in June of 1952.
Alther, at age eleven, with her parents, Alice and Shelton Reed, and brothers Michael, Bill, and John, in June of 1955. This photo was taken at Alther’s aunt’s cottage at Conesus Lake in upstate New York.
Alther’s high school graduation photo. She attended Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennessee, where she played clarinet in the band, was the editor of the school newspaper, and belonged to several community service and social clubs.
Alther at her farmhouse in Vermont in 1976 on the day of the publication of her first novel, Kinflicks.
Seen here in 1992, Alther is posing in front of watercolors she painted and displayed at a group show in New York.
Alther with her grandsons Zachary, eight, and Oliver, three, in New York’s Central Park in December of 2009.
Alther with her mother, Alice, in Lake Champlain, Vermont, in 2000.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Lisa Alther
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0599-0
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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