Haunted by the visible and invisible spirits of his life, Plante embarks on a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Traveling through a past littered with the ghosts of his ethnic lineage (French Canadian), his family heritage, his sexuality and his writing life, he searches to make sense of his spiritual longings and his physical desires. Plante (Difficult Women,
etc.) was raised in a French Catholic parish in Providence, R.I., and his earliest memories revolve around his parochial school days, where the nuns sent mixed messages of religious piety and physical longing. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Plante struggles to fulfill his longings to find God and to understand his family's religious and geographical roots. During his college years, he abandons the search for the God of his childhood, believing any picture of God must allow for the sensual as well as the spiritual. After college, he journeys across Europe, trying to find a way to express his sensual and spiritual longings, discovering that in writing he's found a way to name the pull between the religious and the physical. For Plante, writing becomes a spiritual activity that allows him to understand himself, his family and the world around him. Not so much a memoir as a beautiful diary of the making of a writer, Plante's evocative work hauntingly resurrects the ghosts residing in his life. (Jan. 2005)
