Word: sklenicka
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...Carol Sklenicka's judicious, thorough and sometimes harrowing biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (Scribner; 578 pages), we learn just how well Carver knew the worlds he wrote about. He grew up mostly in blue collar Yakima, Wash., where his father worked in a sawmill, changed jobs frequently and drank heavily, patterns he passed on to his son. Carver was barely 18 when he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, but he had already dedicated himself to life as a writer...
...what that would turn out to mean was a life of struggle. For years, the couple moved constantly, taking whatever jobs they could find while trying to cobble together degrees at one school after another. In Sklenicka's book, Maryann emerges as an admirable if flawed anchor in her husband's life. Companion, breadwinner, fierce believer in Carver's genius, she was also a classic enabler who sank into alcoholism just as he did, though he sank deeper. Over the years, Carver and Maryann, with their two wary children in tow, would suffer just about every indignity that drunkenness confers...
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