Description

After twenty years of burrowing into the corner of the family couch, eating junk food, and reading science fiction, Indiana mother Delonda Jarvis did something that shocked her family: she went to college. Or, as her younger daughter, Haven Kimmel, writes, she "stood up, brushed away the pork rind crumbs, and escaped by the skin of her teeth."

Despite having no money, no car, and a resentful husband, Delonda managed to obtain a master's degree in English. The former teenage bride also dropped one hundred pounds, learned how to drive, and became a breadwinner. But as she reclaimed herself, her marriage disintegrated.

About the Author

Haven Kimmel is the author of The Used World, She Got Up Off the Couch, Something Rising (Light and Swift), The Solace of Leaving Early, and A Girl Named Zippy. She studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University and attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, N.C.

Praise for She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana…

"She Got Up Off the Couch returns to the small-town life that made Kimmel's childhood memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, a bestseller. But this less-sunny sequel looks more tellingly at things that were glossed over in the first book. Zippy's father, for example, is hardly the hero she worshiped as a young girl. And the dirt and disorder the tomboy gloried in has a darker reason: After decades married to a gambler, Delonda had given up. Kimmel never indulges in bitterness, but by the end a reader will be in no doubt about the Kilimanjaro of obstacles her mother scaled on her way off that couch."

-- The Christian Science Monitor

"It is Kimmel's mother's journey from beaten-down housewife to university student and schoolteacher, told through Zippy's irresistible voice, that forms the backbone of She Got Up Off the Couch. Kimmel deftly chronicles a child's awakening to a world outside tiny Mooreland..."

-- The Miami Herald