Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Sunshine State: Essays
    Sunshine State: Essays
    Sunshine State: Essays
    Audiobook10 hours

    Sunshine State: Essays

    Written by Sarah Gerard

    Narrated by Madeleine Maby

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida’s gulf coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival—physical, emotional, environmental—through a collection of essays exploring intimacy, addiction, obsession, religion, homelessness, and incarceration. 

    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. 

    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.

    Sunshine State offers a unique look at Florida, a state whose economically and environmentally imperiled culture serves as a lens through which we can examine some of the most pressing issues haunting our nation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 11, 2017
    ISBN9780062681416
    Sunshine State: Essays
    Author

    Sarah Gerard

    Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel Binary Star, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, and the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help it if We’re From Florida, and One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patrick Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.

    Related to Sunshine State

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Sunshine State

    3.5/5

    29 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I picked up this book of essays because it appeared on a lot of "Best of" lists and because I thought it would help me figure out my new state. And it turns out that the author was raised and lived in basically the next town over from where I am, so there are lots of references to places I am becoming familiar with. However, despite its title, this is not really a book about Florida. Instead, its more of a memoir, the story of a i've, with essays attached, not a tour guide of Florida. Like many books of essays, some are good, some not so good. I will just briefly describe each:"BFF" This is the story of an on-again/off-again troubled friendship written in a breathless stream of consciousness style. I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out who BFF is."Mother-Father God" Her parents were for a long while extremely active in and leaders of an offshoot of the Christian Science church. There's a great deal of church history here, as well as the story of her parents and their backgrounds. Also musings on how religion affected her after she was grown up."Going Diamond" Her parents were also for a long while highly involved with Amway. There's a lot about the history of Amway and its founders. She uses the experiences of her family to ponder the American dream of upward mobility. Interspersed are "stories" (not sure if they are real or made-up) of her and her husband visiting with a real estate agent, with no intention of buying, progressively larger and more luxurious mansions. Quote: "For my part, I'm now skeptical of my materialistic impulses. The dreams I built in Amway don't appeal to me anymore.""Records" Her life as a teenager at an arts magnet school. Lots of drugs and partying. Quote: "My journal entries are sprawling and emotionally wrought.""The Mayor of Williams Park" This is an essay about homelessness, and the criminalization of poverty. In 2009, St. Petersburg was named the second meanest city in the US because of its many ordinances criminalizing homelessness."Sunshine State" The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary on Gulf Boulevard on the Pinellas County barrier islands is right down the street from me, and it (and its founder) have quite a story, all told in this fascinating essay. "At its height over a hundred thousand individuals and ten thousand birds entered the sanctuary's grounds every year, making it the largest nonprofit wild bird hospital in the country." But all is not well in Bird Paradise."Rabbit" Back to memoir again, with the story of her grandparents."Before: An Inventory" "written on the occasion of turning 30.". This experimental piece consists simply of lists of animals she comes across, beginning in June, "Botanical Gardens bees on the roses, white dog at the in-laws, roaches in my apartment--Brooklyn, goldfish at my parents' house--Largo, cats pissing in the laundry, lizards on the porch, jays in the roses, Sunken Gardens kookaburra, cockatoo, flamingo, stray dogs on the freeway off-ramp." And on and on for many, many more pages.3 stars
    • 3/5
      In reality - the first essay was 5 stars - the next 3 I read more like 2.5 to 3.173 pages read of however many pages, I am finished. The first essay was truly incredible - I couldn't wait to read more. Until I did. I knew I was in trouble when I started skimming over the facts of Christian Science while the more personal parts kept me going. Then the Amway piece where it felt like my blood was literally boiling over anger towards DeVos and that ilk. Then trudging through Records for fragments of interesting bits for a mediocre end. I quit. Too many great books out there I can't wait to read.
    • 3/5
      Sunshine State, Gerard’s follow-up to her debut novel, Binary Star, is an impressive, albeit uneven collection of writing. Though the book initially purports to be nonfiction, there are enough cautions scattered throughout to make us question that status, perhaps most notably the beginning of the piece “Sunshine State,” where Gerard states, “Characters in the following story are presenting their own versions of events and do not necessarily reflect the truth, which we may never know.” While these recurring cautions may leave you to question the book’s relationship with the truth, they’re not enough to keep you from continuing a generally engaging collection.

      Conscious as we are of Gerard’s talent and the resulting successes, it would be wrong to suggest this collection is without flaws. In addition to Sunshine State’s slipperiness in coming down on one side of the fiction/nonfiction divide, the final piece feels throwaway, disconnected from the rest of the book, its use of italicization drawing attention to what seemed to me a lack of real, fully-considered content. More even, the book’s dizzying reliance on footnotes was just too much for this sort of non-scholarly work.

      All that said, in Sunshine State’s best work—the opening essay, “BFF”, the title piece, and its follow-on, “Rabbit”—Gerard effortlessly covers vast amounts of emotional and intellectual terrain, doing so in a voice that’s smart and powerful overall, streetwise when necessary. Truly, few writers can manage to be this profound without becoming self-conscious or this affective without becoming overwrought. To accomplish both, with this much style, is indeed rare. Perhaps it’s just that Gerard sets such a high standard with her hits, that her misses are made even more obvious.

      From The Nervous Breakdown's Review Microbrew, Volume 7