Part adventure story, part love story, part homecoming, Still Points North is a page-turning memoir that explores the extremes of belonging and exile, and the difference between how to survive and knowing how to truly live.
Growing up in the wilds of Alaska, seven-year-old Leigh Newman spent her time landing silver salmon, hiking glaciers, and flying in a single-prop plane. But her life split in two when her parents unexpectedly divorced, requiring her to spend summers on the tundra with her “Great Alaskan” father and the school year in Baltimore with her more urbane mother.
Navigating the fraught terrain of her family’s unraveling, Newman did what any outdoorsman would do: She adapted. With her father she fished remote rivers, hunted caribou, and packed her own shotgun shells. With her mother she memorized the names of antique furniture, composed proper bread-and-butter notes, and studied Latin poetry at a private girl’s school. Charting her way through these two very different worlds, Newman learned to never get attached to people or places, and to leave others before they left her. As an adult, she explored the most distant reaches of the globe as a travel writer, yet had difficulty navigating the far more foreign landscape of love and marriage.
In vivid, astonishing prose, Newman reveals how a child torn between two homes becomes a woman who both fears and idealizes connection, how a need for independence can morph into isolation, and how even the most guarded heart can still long for understanding. Still Points North is a love letter to an unconventional Alaskan childhood of endurance and affection, one that teaches us that no matter where you go in life, the truest tests of courage are the chances you take, not with bears and blizzards, but with other people.
Praise for *Still Points North
“Newman has crafted a vivid exploration of a broken family. . . . Her pain will resonate strongly with readers, and she vividly brings both Alaska and Maryland to life. . . . A natural for book clubs.”—Booklist
“Newman’s adult search for her own true home is riveting, as are her worldwide adventures; it’s a joy to be in on the ride.”—Reader’s Digest*
“What really sets this fearless memoir apart is the heartfelt, riotously funning writing, which will have you reading passages aloud, and rooting for Newman all the way.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Newman writes so lucidly about bewilderment, so honestly about self-deception, so courageously about fear, so compassionately about insensitivity, so hilariously about suffering and loss. Still Points North is a remarkable book: a travel memoir of the mapless, dangerous seas and territories between childhood and adulthood.”—Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Swamplandia! “A wise, refreshing and enjoyable read.”—New York Daily News
“[Newman is] at her best bringing to life the chapters on her near-feral Alaskan upbringing. You can practically smell the freshly killed game.”—Entertainment Weekly
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review
Author One-on-One: Karen Russell and Leigh Newman
Leigh and I first met working on a piece of mine about a dog named Waffles. Today we got to sit down and talk about her astonishing new memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-Up World, One Long Journey Home—Karen Russell, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia.
Karen Russell: I’m always interested in what happens when kids escape the big people in charge. You were left to your own devices on the tundra as child. How you think that affected you?
Leigh Newman: Knowing how to take care of yourself in the wilderness was the biggest lesson my dad ever taught me—and one he taught me over and over. He wanted me to know what to do if I ran into a grizzly or if I needed to make a fire or if I fell into a river (float downstream, feet first). I don’t think he was alone in this. Self-reliance is the greatest Alaskan quality. You see it in just about every Alaskan you meet, whether they happened to be hunting for food for the winter or figuring out how to build an outhouse. For me it was a crucial skill after my parent’s divorce, when I began commuting between my mother and father at age seven, flying 5,000 miles between Anchorage and Baltimore, Maryland.
KR: You tell a lot of survival stories about bears in your tent and airplanes falling out of the sky, but there's a lot of family stuff too, about your parent's divorce. How do the two subjects relate?
LN: Well, I’m never going to say that not dying isn’t wonderful. It is! None of us wants to die. But I do think surviving takes a lot of out of you. Once the Super Cub has restarted or the bear has wandered off and it appears that you will get to live a little more, the impulse is to keep going—not to stop and talk and share your feelings. And when it came to my parent’s divorce and my mom’s depression and breakdowns, I think we may have approached these events as if they were plane crash. We got out of the wreck of our family, stunned, and just kept marching on. Our situation took place, for the most part, in the wilderness, so in that sense it was extreme, but I think there are many, many people out there in the world who have used this same approach in more domesticated settings. It leads to competency—you are marching after all—but I’m not sure if it leads to happiness.
KR: You write a lot of short fiction, why did you write a memoir instead of novel?
LN: A memoir was probably the last thing on earth I’d ever want to do. But generally speaking, those are probably the things that you most need to do.
KR: One of the biggest surprises in the Still Points North is the love story between you and your husband. How did that get in a book about Alaska?
LN: The book, to me, was always meant as a love letter to Alaska and to my family, despite our many struggles. I was lucky enough to grow up in place I not just adored but revered. And when I left home, I look all those lessons from the wilderness with me—not just on my travels around the world, but in my relationships. So poor Lawrence not only had deal with my semi-feral sense of independence and all consuming, gut-knotting terror of marriage, but also various wacko Alaskan “tests” I created. Like eating rare mallard. Or finishing a 13k cross-country ski in the pitch black at 10 below zero.
From Booklist
As a child of divorce, Newman was raised on two coasts: fishing and camping with her father in Anchorage, and navigating museums and private school in Baltimore with her mother. Although she relishes sharing details of her wilderness adventures, it is the emotional turmoil wrought by the demise of her parent’s marriage that dominates the book. Newman has crafted a vivid exploration of a broken family, recording episodes of hurt feelings, miscommunication, and more than a few emotional outbursts by a mother who struggled with her own history of parental trauma and a father whose choices did not always include the child from his first marriage. To be certain, there is more than one side to this story, and Newman’s is steadfastly her own, full of the pathos all children endure when their lives are upturned. Her pain will resonate strongly with readers, and she vividly brings both Alaska and Maryland to life. She spares herself no mercy, making it clear that wounds from childhood take decades, and deep understanding, to heal. A natural for book clubs. --Colleen Mondor
Description:
Part adventure story, part love story, part homecoming, Still Points North is a page-turning memoir that explores the extremes of belonging and exile, and the difference between how to survive and knowing how to truly live.
Growing up in the wilds of Alaska, seven-year-old Leigh Newman spent her time landing silver salmon, hiking glaciers, and flying in a single-prop plane. But her life split in two when her parents unexpectedly divorced, requiring her to spend summers on the tundra with her “Great Alaskan” father and the school year in Baltimore with her more urbane mother.
Navigating the fraught terrain of her family’s unraveling, Newman did what any outdoorsman would do: She adapted. With her father she fished remote rivers, hunted caribou, and packed her own shotgun shells. With her mother she memorized the names of antique furniture, composed proper bread-and-butter notes, and studied Latin poetry at a private girl’s school. Charting her way through these two very different worlds, Newman learned to never get attached to people or places, and to leave others before they left her. As an adult, she explored the most distant reaches of the globe as a travel writer, yet had difficulty navigating the far more foreign landscape of love and marriage.
In vivid, astonishing prose, Newman reveals how a child torn between two homes becomes a woman who both fears and idealizes connection, how a need for independence can morph into isolation, and how even the most guarded heart can still long for understanding. Still Points North is a love letter to an unconventional Alaskan childhood of endurance and affection, one that teaches us that no matter where you go in life, the truest tests of courage are the chances you take, not with bears and blizzards, but with other people.
Praise for *Still Points North
“Newman has crafted a vivid exploration of a broken family. . . . Her pain will resonate strongly with readers, and she vividly brings both Alaska and Maryland to life. . . . A natural for book clubs.”—Booklist
“Newman’s adult search for her own true home is riveting, as are her worldwide adventures; it’s a joy to be in on the ride.”—Reader’s Digest*
“What really sets this fearless memoir apart is the heartfelt, riotously funning writing, which will have you reading passages aloud, and rooting for Newman all the way.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Newman writes so lucidly about bewilderment, so honestly about self-deception, so courageously about fear, so compassionately about insensitivity, so hilariously about suffering and loss. Still Points North is a remarkable book: a travel memoir of the mapless, dangerous seas and territories between childhood and adulthood.”—Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Swamplandia!
“A wise, refreshing and enjoyable read.”—New York Daily News
“[Newman is] at her best bringing to life the chapters on her near-feral Alaskan upbringing. You can practically smell the freshly killed game.”—Entertainment Weekly
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review
Author One-on-One: Karen Russell and Leigh Newman
Leigh and I first met working on a piece of mine about a dog named Waffles. Today we got to sit down and talk about her astonishing new memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-Up World, One Long Journey Home—Karen Russell, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia.
Karen Russell: I’m always interested in what happens when kids escape the big people in charge. You were left to your own devices on the tundra as child. How you think that affected you?
Leigh Newman: Knowing how to take care of yourself in the wilderness was the biggest lesson my dad ever taught me—and one he taught me over and over. He wanted me to know what to do if I ran into a grizzly or if I needed to make a fire or if I fell into a river (float downstream, feet first). I don’t think he was alone in this. Self-reliance is the greatest Alaskan quality. You see it in just about every Alaskan you meet, whether they happened to be hunting for food for the winter or figuring out how to build an outhouse. For me it was a crucial skill after my parent’s divorce, when I began commuting between my mother and father at age seven, flying 5,000 miles between Anchorage and Baltimore, Maryland.
KR: You tell a lot of survival stories about bears in your tent and airplanes falling out of the sky, but there's a lot of family stuff too, about your parent's divorce. How do the two subjects relate?
LN: Well, I’m never going to say that not dying isn’t wonderful. It is! None of us wants to die. But I do think surviving takes a lot of out of you. Once the Super Cub has restarted or the bear has wandered off and it appears that you will get to live a little more, the impulse is to keep going—not to stop and talk and share your feelings. And when it came to my parent’s divorce and my mom’s depression and breakdowns, I think we may have approached these events as if they were plane crash. We got out of the wreck of our family, stunned, and just kept marching on. Our situation took place, for the most part, in the wilderness, so in that sense it was extreme, but I think there are many, many people out there in the world who have used this same approach in more domesticated settings. It leads to competency—you are marching after all—but I’m not sure if it leads to happiness.
KR: You write a lot of short fiction, why did you write a memoir instead of novel?
LN: A memoir was probably the last thing on earth I’d ever want to do. But generally speaking, those are probably the things that you most need to do.
KR: One of the biggest surprises in the Still Points North is the love story between you and your husband. How did that get in a book about Alaska?
LN: The book, to me, was always meant as a love letter to Alaska and to my family, despite our many struggles. I was lucky enough to grow up in place I not just adored but revered. And when I left home, I look all those lessons from the wilderness with me—not just on my travels around the world, but in my relationships. So poor Lawrence not only had deal with my semi-feral sense of independence and all consuming, gut-knotting terror of marriage, but also various wacko Alaskan “tests” I created. Like eating rare mallard. Or finishing a 13k cross-country ski in the pitch black at 10 below zero.
From Booklist
As a child of divorce, Newman was raised on two coasts: fishing and camping with her father in Anchorage, and navigating museums and private school in Baltimore with her mother. Although she relishes sharing details of her wilderness adventures, it is the emotional turmoil wrought by the demise of her parent’s marriage that dominates the book. Newman has crafted a vivid exploration of a broken family, recording episodes of hurt feelings, miscommunication, and more than a few emotional outbursts by a mother who struggled with her own history of parental trauma and a father whose choices did not always include the child from his first marriage. To be certain, there is more than one side to this story, and Newman’s is steadfastly her own, full of the pathos all children endure when their lives are upturned. Her pain will resonate strongly with readers, and she vividly brings both Alaska and Maryland to life. She spares herself no mercy, making it clear that wounds from childhood take decades, and deep understanding, to heal. A natural for book clubs. --Colleen Mondor