The figurative language of Lori Lansens

Reading time: Less than 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphor from Lori Lansens…

I jokingly like to say I have a “lifetime to 10 list.” By this I mean that I have 10 books that so impressed me they have changed my understanding of the act of writing.

In truth, however, the list is malleable. It changes from year to year and varies with my increasingly unreliable memory. Also, from time to time, I have re-read books on this alleged list and found I no longer liked them nearly as much. Go figure!

Nevertheless, Lori Lansens’s book The Girls has been a fixture on my list for more than 10 years. (I have not yet re-read it, nor can I remember which book it replaced.) The story of 29-year-old conjoined twins, linked at the side of the head, the book is presented as an autobiography with each character relating her own thoughts and feelings. I found the story deeply engaging, perhaps because I’m the mother of triplets, and the writing, superb.

For many years, I held the hope that Lansens would be able to repeat her feat. Alas, to my mind at least, she hasn’t done it. Her most recent book The Mountain Story, was slow and plodding and didn’t contain much of the fine writing that had so burnished The Girls. That said, I did find one particularly evocative metaphor. Here it is:

I remember sitting there that morning, finding some tragic beauty in the way the sun came in through the cracked kitchen window and hit the stratus clouds of cigarette smoke, making haloes around the small children’s heads.

I admire the adjectives in this sentence — the mixture of tragic with beauty and the detail of the kitchen window being cracked — and I like the way she finds something natural — stratus clouds — to compare with utterly unnatural cigarette smoke. I also like the way she juxtaposes the evil of cigarette smoke (evil as far as children are concerned) with the irony of it forming a halo above their heads.

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