Books
- Paperback Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-55861-274-7
- Publication Date: 10-01-2001
- Page Count: 176
- Categories: Fiction, Italian/Italian American
- Search within this book, powered by Google.
DOROTHY BRYANT is a native San Franciscan, the daughter of immigrants from northern Italy. She attended public schools in the Mission District, then San Francisco State University, completing a BA in music (1950) and an MA in creative writing (1964).
The Test
Afterword by Barbara Horn
From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes this timeless story about caring for an aging parent. With complexity, bravery, and dry humor, The Test details the frustrating push and pull between Pat and her eighty-year-old father, who is attempting—for the third and last time—to pass the test to renew his driver's license. Bryant's unflinching gaze sees deep into the hearts of both parent and child, revealing the dramatic, awkward, and universal struggle each faces with aging, memory, and love. Trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood and of who her parents once were, Pat puzzles out the confabulations of family memory: how stories become accepted fact, how facts get twisted in stories, and how some perspectives are lost completely. In a deeply sensitive examination of one woman's coping with the changes of aging, Bryant offers a rare and moving testimony.
"Wryly comic, . . . Bryant's examinations of thorny, contemporary relationships have docudrama punch, building as they do on sharp, harsh recognitions: a masterful portrait."
"For nearly twenty years, Berkeley novelist Dorothy Bryant has consistently and amazingly anticipated the events and issues of her time. . . .The Test offers the kind of fiercely wise observations we have come to expect of Bryant."
"The cutting incisiveness of the characterizations, the delicate balance between tragedy and humor, the entire tautness and clarity and the depths of feeling come through. . . . A vividly alive glimpse into the human condition."
NEA Grant will help fund the digitization of 15 Feminist Press classics, and the publication of three extraordinary literary works: Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser, Kissing the Sword: A Prison Memoir by Shahrnush Parsipur, and The Silent Woman by Monika Zgustova.
