Obscure Destinies
by Rebecca Brown
"With rare precision and understated candor, Brown creates an innovative quartet where the writing itself becomes a tender experiment in care."
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl
For more than forty years, Rebecca Brown has been writing novels, stories, and essays about how the living cope with the dying of people they love. In her newest book, Brown has gathered four distinct forms—a story, a memoir, a play, and an essay—to bear on four such encounters: a group of gay teens in 1970s Texas, responding to the death of a beloved, and closeted, teacher; old friends in 21st-century Seattle helping a loved one die of cancer; a pair of siblings teaching each other how to live in the wake of a parent’s death; and the lives portrayed in Willa Cather's story collection of the same title, Obscure Destinies.
Like Cather’s collection, Rebecca Brown’s Obscure Destinies focuses on the everyday people whose lives would, if not for our love of them, remain obscure. This is the 17th book in the Fellow Travelers Series.
