Look Both Ways

With exquisite insight and radiant energy, Katharine Coles enters the reckless hearts of Miriam and Walter, her mercurial, brilliant, charismatic grandparents. Profound and provocative, Look Both Ways unconceals the catalytic convergence of two volatile personalities in a time of scientific discovery, cultural turmoil, and political transformation. --Melanie Rae Thon My using words to describe the adventure, the history, the love and heart and mystery found in Look Both Ways is to do the book a disservice. Though this beautiful and moving memoir spans continents and cultures, centuries and climates, generations and the day to day, Katharine Coles keeps the tale as intimate, and as meaningful, as any memoir I have read. --Bret Lott Katharine Coles creates an arresting simultaneity between the past and present, a woman's need for freedom and belonging, adventure and love. She delves into the diaries and journals of her grandparents, following their footsteps, finding everywhere a means to recalibrate her own sense of self-definition within a 21st-century marriage. In exploring how desire plays out for women within the constraints of their time and character, this composite memoir offers a compelling portrait of what it is to live mindfully in a female body. --Alison Hawthorne Deming I'm over the moon about Katharine Coles's new book. In it, we watch a woman ahead of her time battle the strictures of that time, a woman in a far different era doing the same, examining in the process the delicate balance between love and freedom that must take place in a truly feminist life, the delicate balance between honesty and compassion that must exist in a truly successful marriage. Rapturous, wise, and lyrical, fascinating in terms of history, science, and social custom, deeply moving, this hybrid biography/memoir is as transcendent as the best of novels, fierce, dazzling, and true. --Betsy Burton, Owner, The King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City