Collect Call To My Mother

Short-Listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award

Collect Call to My Mother follows Lori Horvitz’ experiences as a queer Jewish New Yorker living in the South, looking for love in the internet age. When she teaches a class of queer college students who look to her as a role model, what they don’t know is that she spent her twenties and thirties in the closet, and leapt from one relationship disaster to the next. Each of her turbulent trysts helps unearth the roots of her poor judgment: a chaotic upbringing, compounded by her mother’s emotional distance and early death. In these essays exploring themes of love, family, and grief, Horvitz gradually embraces who she is and finds a healthy, long-term relationship.

Praise & Reviews

“…Horvitz’s lucid prose offers a nuanced depiction of her rocky path to
self-acceptance. Lyrical, frank, and meditative, this consideration of grief
and identity resonates.”
 

“In her remarkable memoir-in-essays, Lori Horvitz valiantly heeds, as both a writer and a human, E.M. Forster’s admonition to ‘Only connect.’ Haunted by grief and ghosts and questions of identity, Horvitz never stops seeking love, in all its forms. This book is a thoughtful, moving, and candidly funny
affirmation of life.”
—Kimberly Elkins, author of What Is Visible

“Lori Horvitz’s vibrant second collection of essays, equal parts heart, humor, and heartbreak, is impossible to put down…Whatever her vast and amazing range of subjects—family, relationships, dogs, grief and loss, Allen Ginsberg—each and every essay is beautifully crafted and resonant.”
—Gary Eldon Peter, author of Oranges and The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen

Collect Call to My Mother is a hilarious, endearing, and achingly honest memoir. If you’ve ever felt like a misfit, you will see yourself in these funny, sad, and ultimately hopeful essays.”
—Sharon Harrigan, author of Half and Playing with Dynamite