Pure Flame

About the book

'Rich and moving' New York Times

'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter

During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.

So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the...