Girl Behind the Door
A memoir of delirium and dementia
by Stephanie Dickinson

“Girl Behind the Door opens with the renegade Iowa farm girl who ran away to New York City to be a writer returning home to find her dying, nearly 100-year-old mother lying naked on a bed in the Memory Care Unit of a nursing home. Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinson’s language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God.”

--Alice Jurish

“The great state of Iowa has raised many chickens, but Stephanie Dickinson sure as rain isn’t one of them. Bravely tackling the complex nature of the mother-daughter relationship through all of its peaks and valleys, Dickinson’s memorable prose will by turns amuse you, wrench your heart, and curl your toes. Dickinson provides us with a panoply of object lessons; most notably, how, at the moments that really count, rebelliousness turns to tenderness and we tightly clutch our familial cords and connections, even while butting heads with them. In Girl Behind the Door, we learn that the landscape from which this fiercely passionate writer hails possesses the best soil on earth, and Stephanie Dickinson has dug deeply into the muck and mire to unearth her past—and, in doing so, ours.”

--Cindy Hochman, author of Habeas Corpus

“As a teenager she decided to fly. Her mother’s old Rambler with her at the wheel crested the hill, with grave consequences. In Girl Behind the Door, Stephanie Dickinson flies on every page. What a book! A delicious memoir, or deathwatch, in which death dies. Florence, her mother, lives. Iowa lives, all “the gone ones.” We know her childhood better than we know our own, the Bureshes and Teleckys better than our own relatives. A read with moist eyes. Unflagging emotion and exquisite clarity, incredible candor and perspicacity, her signature poetry. It is brave, naked as her dementia mother. Our eyes are wet and our hearts are full. It is a farewell that makes you hungry for life. She heaps our plates.”

Jill Hoffman, author of Jilted and No Other Way