27th letter

The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet

The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet chronicles a daughter's struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. In this memoir, structured as a glossary, Kim Adrian seeks to make peace with a troubled childhood by cataloguing memories, anecdotes, and family lore. But within this careful reckoning of the past, the unruly present carves an unpredictable path as her aging mother plunges into ever-deeper realms of drug-fueled paranoia. Ultimately, the imposed order of the glossary serves less to contain the chaos of a mother's mental illness than to illuminate the difficult and messy reality of loving someone you cannot save.

A Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist
Poets & Writers New & Noteworthy Read

University of Nebraska Press, 2018

- PRAISE -

“This ambitious memoir glints with poetry and wisdom. . . . Aching, endless, unresolved, and extremely compelling.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Astonishing and inventive. [Adrian's] glossary is strangely gripping, with a momentum pulling the reader in and through. The result is whimsical, even darkly funny at times, brimming with compassion, terribly sad and deeply loving. Memoir readers should not miss this singular offering.”
—Shelf Awareness

“An intimate and searching accumulation of the moments, tender and brutal, that heap together and create a life.”
—The Boston Globe

“A stunning merger of form and content; a remarkable portrait-becomes-self-portrait.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

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