Renee Ashley – författare

“. . . Tomorrow is our anniversary. Tomorrow we have been married at least one thousand years.” How does a woman move from one life to another? Can she? In this lyrical and often very funny novel, thirty-seven-year old Dore Dover searches for answers both in the familiar territories of old friendships and the mapless terrain of marriage.   What hope can there be for a woman who says aloud, “I drag that old life with me like a dead cat in a sack”?   “It has been pointed out to me that I am undefined, that I don’t know what I want, and that this is my whole problem. It is entirely probable. If I knew what I wanted, I’d just go get it. But as it is, I don’t know, and so here I sit on this damp stoop, outside a house we no longer own, leaving, with a husband whom, it is quite probable, I do not love, to go live in a rather isolated area, which, some time ago, gave me a great deal of pleasure.   “I am too old for this . . .”   Dore takes on the world and herself in this first novel by acclaimed poet Renée Ashley. While the ground is shifting beneath her, Dore discovers what her truths might be in the troubled places within herself.

"Basic Heart" is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that 'world is turned like a pig on a spit'. She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that 'what is saved just might turn beautiful'.