Revertigo

An Off-Kilter Memoir

Floyd Skloot

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780299299507
• eBook ISBN: 9780299299538
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot's account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form.
            This intimate memoir—tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous—demonstrates Skloot's considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning world prompt further musings on the forces of uncertainty, change, and displacement that have shaped him from childhood to late middle age, repeatedly knocking him awry, realigning his hopes and plans, even his perceptions. From the volatile forces of his mercurial, shape-shifting early years to his obsession with reading, acting, and writing, from the attack of vertigo to a trio of postvertigo (but nevertheless dizzying) journeys to Spain and England, and even to a place known only in his mother's unhinged fantasies, Skloot makes sense of a life's phantasmagoric unpredictability.

Finalist, Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: O Wondrous Transformation!
• Part Two: On and Off the Page
• Part Three: A Spinning World
• Part Four: Cartwheelson the Moon