Inquire about speaking engagements, book clubs, interviews, reviews or other publicity for The Part That Burns.
Starred Kirkus Review for The Part That Burns
A textured remembrance of childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty.
Taylor Swift as Books
What Taylor Swift would look like, dressed as The Part That Burns.
We Can Be Both Torn And Whole: Talking With Jeannine Ouellette
Ouellette’s superpower is her expansive writing style that embraces metaphor, while guiding us from the innocence of childhood to the wisdom of experience, and back.
The Part That Burns Selected for What to Read in 2021 by the Rumpus
This is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.
Interview with Jeannine Ouellette, Author of The Part That Burns
The truth is that those pieces were always working in conversation with each other and I knew that from the start, which is why I made the book in the first place.
Review by Jody Keisner
Reading Ouellette’s memoir-in-essays, I thought about the scientific plausibility of my own fury leaving a chemical mark on the genes I passed down to my daughter, who I’m happy to say, has learned healthier ways of expressing her anger.
Booklife by Publisher’s Weekly Review
Ouellette’s memoir inventively laces together her past, present, and future, resulting in an innovative yet deeply emotional reading experience.
Review by Bridget Lillethorup
In The Part That Burns, Ouellette masters the perspective of a child. Her essays are not just an act of remembering; they are a sincere motion of embodying her younger self. We hear her voice as it was as a child.
Review by Kristine Jepsen
The enduring craft of this memoir is language, lush and precise. But beyond it lies an astonishing, unhurried fidelity to uncertainty, grief, and healing.
How do we get over abuse?
Jeannine Ouelette joins Caroline Leavitt to discuss The Part That Burns, listening to your body, writing and so much more.
JEANNINE OUELLETTE: OPEN WATER
Exclusive excerpt from Jeannine Oullette’s memoir in fragments, The Part That Burns
Review by Francesca Moroney
In the exploration of the abuse, it has echoes of the memoirs of Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, and Tara Westover, as well as the semi-autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina, whose author, Dorothy Allison, is cited by Ouellette as an influence, and who has said the following about Ouellette’s work: “I love this book and am grateful it is in the world.” This reviewer agrees wholeheartedly.
Review by Marion Winik
Tell all the truth but tell it slant, said Emily Dickinson — another way of describing what Ouellette accomplishes here. All the truth, and many slants, like the angles of sun through the hours of a day.
Review by Frank Fitzpatrick
Jeannine Ouellette’s courageous and gripping memoir The Part That Burns should be read by everyone.
Review by Samantha Paige Rosen
The prose itself is vivid and poetic. Her descriptions are patient, meticulous, dazzling: "High above the lake, a flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open the black water with a sharp tunnel of light."
The Part That Burns, a Split/Lip Press memoir in fragments by Jeannine Ouellette, reviewed by Lisa Elaine Low
I slid down this memoir quickly, from the first word, in a state of unconscious absorption, unaware of time, not putting it down. Now that I am done; now that I have landed on the ground, I am left in a daze, sitting stunned and still, listening to the buzz of flies, trying to make sense of a painful world I have just passed through. And, more or less, wanting to start at the top and read it all over again.
““We’re Not Static”: Shauna Gilligan Interviews Jeannine Ouellette
The shapeshifting nature of the past, and the reality of cellular memory—this truth that we carry our past selves within us for our whole lives—was always the framework for the book.
Literary calendar: Jeannine Ouellette talks about ‘The Part That Burns’
In email correspondence with the Pioneer Press, Ouellette writes that “my writing process was informed in part by my work at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where I am helping to spearhead a project using narrative medicine and democratized inquiry to advance public health and health stewardship, especially in regard to health disparities.”
Epic Journey: A Childhood Memoir and Other Minnesota Stories
Memoirs about abusive and neglected childhoods are hardly a rare commodity. Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, and Tara Westover’s Educated—great books all— spring immediately to mind, each featuring a girl-child narrator/adult author wrestling with her painful early years. But rarely have I read a memoir as delicately wrought and convincingly told from a child’s point of view as Jeannine Ouellette’s The Part That Burns: a memoir in fragments(Split/Lip Press).
Finding Wholeness in Fragments, Again
My book would be born in a time of sickness and death, fear and fury, isolation and collapse. Hardly what I had expected. As I say in the memoir, “Expectations can be slippery.”
The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette’s The Part That Burns
One might be tempted to think the beauty acts as a shield.... But another reading is this simply is Ouellette exulting ... in both the glory of the world around her and her ability to make it her own.
Story Circle Reviews The Part That Burns.
Life is complex, and her beautifully rendered story confirms this. It’s a short, immediate, and powerful account of coming to terms with what life has dealt you and how you handle it. Both Jeannine Ouellette and her daughter Lillian Ouellette-Howitz are authors worth watching.
Becoming Our Whole Self – an Interview with Jeannine Ouellette
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself.
“The elliptical, evolving nature of memory”: Jeannine Ouellette’s memoir The Part that Burns
At one point in the book the narrator says, “It takes so long to become anything. Especially yourself.” And I believe that — that we are always in this process of becoming.