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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

STILL POINTS NORTH

Leigh Newman

A searing memoir about searching for home, set on the tundra of the Alaskan Bush, for fans of Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

Growing up in the wilds of Alaska prepares you for a lot of things: overly friendly bears, overly distant caribou, stalled single-prop planes and raging rapids. However, it doesn’t help you with: tea dances, monogrammed napkins, and a girl’s school where not crossing your ankles while sitting down is a punishable offense. At age eight, the world of spunky, fish-gutting Leigh Newman is, literally, split in two when her parents’ divorce, requiring her to spend part of the year on the Alaska tundra with her father and the other part in Baltimore blue-blood society with her mother. At turns funny, inspiring, heartwarming and heartbreaking, Leigh traces her adult life as a travel writer, bouncing from country to country, and from non-relationship to non-relationship. That is, until she meets up with a certain stinky street dog and a tender yet very badly dressed man who, after a bumpy start, show her that there is a place she belongs. Part love letter to Alaska and part love story, Still Points North is a moving story about trying to find your way back home - and back to yourself. Leigh Newman is a columnist and deputy editor of Oprah.com where she writes the book blog, and her travel writing has been anthologized in Crown’s The Collected Traveler book series (Tuscany and Venice editions) and My Parents Were Awesome (Villard, 2011). She has also written for the New York Times “Modern Love” column. As a long-time travel writer, Leigh has traveled extensively abroad (and is fluent in French), but she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

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Book Published 2013-04-01 by Random House

Comments

What really sets this fearless memoir apart is the heartfelt, riotously funny writing, which will have you reading passages aloud, and rooting for Newman all the way.

At once harrowing and tender-hearted, Still Points North is a memoir that reminds us of the fragility of family architecture and of father figures as mysterious, heroic, flawed humans. Leigh Newman illuminates the power of domestic discord to become a literal struggle for survival, brilliantly drawing a picture of a child tumbling through her family’s dissolution as she struggles to make sense of what family means.

Still Points North begins in the remote woods of Alaska and then travels around the world and back again, tracking the adventures of a girl set adrift. Newman navigates her way through these exquisitely written pages with the strength and skill of a river guide, always keeping her bearings, and, like the salmon her father teaches her to catch in the wilderness, learns how to remove the hooks from own her life and set herself back in the water.

Newman is an inspiration--eventually embracing all of the quirky facets of her parents to create a family for herself.

Without dipping into self-pity, Ms. Newman’s memoir, her first book, is a moving account of the number that divorce does on a child. Luckily, growing up in Alaska she learned survival skills, including self-reliance, which helps her endure private school in Baltimore, where she lands with her mother. She’s at her best back home visiting her father. The same can be said of this book over all. Flying in her father’s prop plane, skiing across a frozen lake, encountering a black bear and nearly dying during all of the above — this is where the writing really comes to life.