About the Book

“Indeed, I did not think of myself as a woman first of all. . . . I wanted to be pure flame.” —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

A searing work of cultural memoir, Michelle Orange’s Pure Flame explores illness, mortality and questions of maternal legacy in the context of modern feminism. It tells the story of three women—Orange’s grandmother, her mother and herself, born at the beginning, in the middle and toward the end of the twentieth century, respectively—and traces the impact and influence of that century’s feminist movements through their relationships. A question asked during a gathering of some of the era’s most powerful female writers, thinkers and activists—including Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Elizabeth Hardwick—informs much of the book’s blend of social, cultural and personal inquiry: If a woman is not to model herself after her mother, by whose example should she live?

In Pure Flame, Orange grapples with this question and reckons with her mother’s life choices, including the decision to leave her family in order to transform herself from housewife to MBA to CEO—a personally rewarding but gruelling journey that would cause her to develop lung disease. When this illness becomes serious, Orange’s account of their lives becomes pressurizing in critical and unexpected ways, resulting in a revelatory portrait of love, loss and the endlessly complex and fascinating mother-daughter bond.