Eyes, Throat, Wheat, Hen, Cave, Sash, and Bread. These are the seven siblings at the center of Regular Eggs, a memoir written in imaginative third-person flash. Through fragments of memory and story, Erhardt chronicles the relationships formed in a home marked by the containments of landscape, history, illness, performance, Catholicism, and The Price is Right. While the title references a mother's suspicion of those sold as free-range, the flashes themselves are "regular" in that they recount the ordinary lives of kids growing up in small-town New York in the eighties and nineties. Yet, these stories are remarkable in their conception: nonlinear, self-questioning, with siblings existing at multiple ages on a single page--like eggs cracking and colliding. Humor becomes entwined with grief. Brothers and sisters lose track of which stories belong to which child.
Experimental and accessible, with humor and heart,
Regular Eggs re-incubates a family story, inviting the reader as witness to cradle (or crack) their own delicate, complex kinships.
