Sunshine State

Essays

Sarah Gerard

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780062434876
• eBook ISBN: 9780062434883
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay • Finalist for the Southern Book Prize

A New York Times Critics’ Best Books of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A NYLON Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • An Entrophy Magazine Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Brooklyn Rail Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Baltimore Beat Best Book of the Year

A Paris Review Staff Pick • A Chicago Tribune Exciting Book for 2017 • A Rolling Stone Culture Index Reccomendation • A Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book for 2017 • A The Millions Great 2017 Book Preview Pick • A Huffington Post 2017 Preview Pick • A NYLON Best 10 Books of the Month • A Lit Hub 15 Books to Read This Month A Poets & Writers New and Noteworth Selection • A PW Top 10 Spring Pick in Essays & Literary Criticism • An Emma Straub Reccomendation on PBS

“One of the themes of ‘Sunshine State,’ Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease…. The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire.... This essay draws blood.”   — Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history…. A nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic… her writing, lucid yet atmospheric, takes on a timeless ebb and flow.”   — Jason Heller, NPR.org

"Stunning."   — Rolling Stone

“These large-hearted, meticulous essays offer an uncanny x-ray of our national psyche...  showing us both the grand beauty of our American dreams and the heartbreaking devastation they wreak.”  — Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

Sarah Gerard follows her breakout novel, Binary Star, with the dynamic essay collection Sunshine State, which explores Florida as a microcosm of the most pressing economic and environmental perils haunting our society.

In the collection’s title essay, Gerard volunteers at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, a world renowned bird refuge.  There she meets its founder, who once modeled with a pelican on his arm for a Dewar’s Scotch campaign but has since declined into a pit of fraud and madness. He becomes our embezzling protagonist whose tales about the birds he “rescues” never quite add up. Gerard’s personal stories are no less eerie or poignant: An essay that begins as a look at Gerard’s first relationship becomes a heart-wrenching exploration of acquaintance rape and consent. An account of intimate female friendship pivots midway through, morphing into a meditation on jealousy and class.

With the personal insight of The Empathy Exams, the societal exposal of Nickel and Dimed, and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel Binary Star, Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face. 

Endnotes

Mother-Father God

1. Leddy told the story of the disciples asking Jesus to hush the children: Hammock, interview, March 14, 2016.

2. One night in 1978, my mom went to a biker bar in South Tampa to hear the Mad Beach Band: P. Gerard, interview, July 11, 2015.

3. One day, she was supposed to meet the man who was installing new carpet: Ibid.

4. Leddy Hammock had taken over as co-minister just the year before: Unity-Clearwater Church, Golden Anniversary.

5. invited my mom to meet them, too: P. Gerard, interview, March 15, 2016.

6. Increased industrialization was reducing the demand for men’s physical labor: Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom, 8.

7. inspired the rise of moral reform groups largely led by women: Ibid., 22.

8. The number of women in higher education also increased dramatically, as did the number of women in the workforce: Ibid., 21.

9. research in the scientific and medical fields was raising questions about the unseen world: Ibid., 49–51.

10. Germ theory, popularized in 1876, introduced the general populace to the theory that sickness was caused by outside forces, not internal weaknesses: Ibid., 51–52.

11. The debate gave new, scientific validation to more general fears of contagion: Ibid., 51.

12. Many women saw hypnotism as an opportunity to bring about a new era in which mind ruled matter: Ibid., 52.

13. their claims to power had previously been based upon self-sacrifice and spiritual superiority on the grounds of moral purity, reinforcing the association of women with the “feminine heart”: Ibid., 30–31.

14. Mary Baker Eddy traveled from Rumney, New Hampshire, to Belfast, Maine, to see a famous healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: Ibid., 62.

15. Quimby had reportedly cured thousands of people around New England: Ibid., 60.

16. Eddy was the youngest of six children: Rogers, “Mary Baker Eddy and the A...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• BFF
• Mother-Father God
• Going Diamond
• Records
• The Mayor of Williams Park
• Sunshine State
• Rabbit
• Before: An Inventory
• Acknowledgments
• An Excerpt from TRUE LOVE
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• Advance Praise for Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard
• Also by Sarah Gerard
• Copyright
• About the Publisher