In the Rhododendrons

Named a Best/Most Recommended Book of the Season/Year by Town & Country, Chicago Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, The Millions, Literary Hub, and Daily Kos

"Christle’s exacting rigor and ferocious curiosity are matched only by the utter eccentricity of her vision, the delicious and frankly peerless freshness of her idiom: 'There is a difference between bones and a book,' she writes, 'but both have at their center a spine.' What results is irreducibly human. In the Rhododendrons is vital consolation. It’s a triumph, an instant classic. Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners."—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times-bestselling author of Martyr!

“I first fell in love with Heather Christle’s writing in The Crying Book and her astonishing hybrid memoir, In the Rhododendrons, cements my devotion. In Christle’s narrative of discovery, of pilgrimages and portals, silence and reclamation, and the surprising bonds between a mother, a daughter, and Virginia Woolf, readers will experience a rare and wondrous mind at work. Heart-breaking, revelatory, exquisite, and ultimately ecstatic, this book is a gift.”—Jessamine Chan, New York Times-bestselling author of The School for Good Mothers

“For lovers of Virginia Woolf and nonfiction, you don’t want to miss In the Rhododendrons… Christie ties together these three narratives like a finely built nest to illuminate key moments in each life. In the Rhododendrons has us wondering why every memoir doesn’t include more conversation about Virginia Woolf.”—Chicago Review of Books

“In the Rhododendrons is an emotional memoir that also serves as an individual intellectual history, moving between generalizations about what poets love and how people are and highly specific scenes of (dis)connection, (un)realization, and the Wo(o)lf that guides.”—Poetry Northwest's Favorite Books for Spring

“The precise observations and playful juxtapositions Christle deploys in her poetry, and the fusion of personal revelation with wide-ranging research she performs in The Crying Book, return to make In the Rhododendrons a moving and fascinating exploration both of her own life and of the process of reading and re-learning the past… a remarkable work of synthesis, overlay, and double exposure, in which past and present, child and adult, literary figure and family member illuminate each other… beautiful.”—Cleveland Review of Books

“Stunning. I saw her working in a shaft of light, dusting layer after layer off her own life.”
 —Patricia Lockwood, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel No One Is Talking About This

"In the Rhododendrons is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their parents. Heather Christle unearths the tangled roots that connect mother to daughter, collapsing time and interrogating the limits and strengths of language and memory through personal and family history as well as through Virginia Woolf's life and work. ‘Looking changes what you see,’ Christle writes. Words to live by."—Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don't Talk About and What My Father and I Don't Talk About

"A subtle marvel, this book, so many stories at once and all of them brilliantly told. Christle writes of mothers and motherlands and gardens and empires, of writing and seeing and looking again. And Virginia Woolf! Her haunting of these pages is a startling pleasure and provocation, a summons to read everything—our books, our lives—with the wondrous care Christle brings to each word of In the Rhododendrons."—Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Undertow

“The experience of reading Heather Christle’s hybrid memoir, in which she weaves together threads of trauma shared by herself, her mother’s life, and Virginia Woolf, feels like being in a conversation with a brilliant and deeply curious friend. It’s a knockout.”—Literary Hub, Monthly Nonfiction Recommendation

“Dazzling… With lyrical prose… a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt.”—Publishers Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW*

“Meditative, analytic, and heartfelt... Christle exudes a refreshing approach to imagination—one that involves reconstructing unlikely human connections... Mesmerizing and at times whimsical, this book brings readers on a journey beyond linear time and across continents, all for the sake of finding comfort and beauty in the garden of words.”—Booklist

"Making sense of trauma. Award-winning poet Christle examines her life, her relationship with her mother, and her affinity with Virginia Woolf in a lyrical memoir… to find meaning and coherence in the ‘unknowable parts’ of the past. A sensitive chronicle of pain."—Kirkus Reviews

“Christle writes with a poet’s close attention to language and nature… In the Rhododendrons is a meditative and often beautiful narrative, a reminder that the experiences and words of the writers we love can illuminate our own lives.” —BookPage

“I was an ardent fan of Christle’s 2019 The Crying Book, and have a feeling her latest—a hybrid memoir that weaves personal narrative together with meditations on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—will bowl me over me yet again.”—The Millions, "The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview"