Reeling Through Life

An ';insightful [and] original blend of memoir and film criticism' explores how what we watch shapes our identities (Chicago Tribune). Winner of the PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction Through ten cleverly constructed essays, author, screenwriter, and passionate film buff Tara Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love. Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison takes a personal, in-depth look at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide-ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style. Rather than just a means of escape or mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realitiesa way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at how this popular art form has influenced the way we live our lives.