"Mary Cappello['s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed." --MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

"A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book." --SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger

Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys--from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text--to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.

Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.