Review\n"Good things can happen to lonely hearts and wounded families. . . . Fans of both Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler are likely to enjoy this satisfying, unhurried novel." - Kirkus (starred review)\nA story about the ties that bind us, Close-Up explores what makes, drives, complicates, and undermines our most important relationships.\nIn this artful, expansive novel, we follow five protagonists―Jacob, Martin, Caroline, Jeanie, and Jill―through love, marriage, parenthood, and the romance of friendship as they struggle to make sense of themselves and each other and of what makes for good art, good magic, and a good life. What follows is a story only Michelle Herman could write: one of missed connections and old grievances, of loneliness and longing, of rifts and reconciliations and redemption. Close-Up depicts the fraught entanglements of the relationships we’re born into and those we choose―carefully or with abandon―with the precision and nuance that has characterized her work over the last thirty years.

Close-Up: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Herman, Michelle

Genre Fiction

Columbus State University Press

The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood

When she was three months old, Michelle Herman's daughter, Grace, went on a hunger strike. At six, she suffered what can only be described, in the old-fashioned way, as a breakdown. And at the ripe old age of eight, she began a study of the nature of "true romance." Motherhood may come naturally, but it doesn't necessarily come easily—certainly not as easily as it seemed to this mother when she vowed to do a better job than her own mother had. But the real trouble started when Herman decided that “better” wasn't good enough: she would be the perfect mother. A memoir from the front lines of motherhood by a longtime writer of fiction, The Middle of Everything weaves a daughter's memories of her Brooklyn childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, and the shadow cast on it by her own young mother's paralyzing depression, with a middle-aged woman's account of trying to break her mother's mold by meeting her own child's every need. A story of love of all kinds, of work and friendship (especially best-friendship, its rewards and perils both), of the charms of other people's families, of the miseries and pleasures of aging, and of the twists of the ties that bind each generation to the next, Michelle Herman's book is an energetic, exhaustive, lacerating, unflinching, and often hilarious inside look at the very nature of motherhood.

Essays & Correspondence

University Of Nebraska Press

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Missing (A Sandstone Book)

Eighty-nine-year-old Rivke Vasilevsky discovers her crystal beads missing and becomes lost in a reverie in which she attempts to make sense of all that has happened to her in her life

United States

Ohio State Univ Pr

Eighty-nine-year-old Rivke Vasilevsky discovers her crystal beads missing and becomes lost in a reverie in which she attempts to make sense of all that has happened to her in her life

Contemporary

A collection of three novellas by Michelle Herman.

A New and Glorious Life (Carnegie Mellon Short Fiction)

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

If You Say So

Arts & Literature

Galileo Press

Like A Song: Essays

Independently published

Single, childless, J.T. Rosen—a poet and college professor who has failed to live up to her early promise—has constructed a careful, orderly life around her work and the little house she has lived in alone for many years. Long ago, after a tumultuous youth filled with the "Sturm und Drang of boys and men," she gave up on the possibility of love; she has begun by now, in the Middle Western town she cannot bring herself to think of as home, to give up on the possibility of friendship. 
When the dog enters her life, almost by accident he takes over her life, as puppies do. 
But as the days and weeks pass, the relationship that unfolds between dog and woman provides a glimpse for her of the possibilities that life still offers, of goodness that she begins to understand can be "counted on" in some inexplicable way. 
Dog is about how a person constructs a life for herself, about the bits and pieces that make up a life as one goes along, and about the possibility of goodness, always, among those pieces—the possibility of love, and grace.

MACADAM/CAGE.

Lawson Library

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Books by Herman, Michelle