Kinsella, Bridget

views updated

Kinsella, Bridget

PERSONAL:

Married; husband's name Alexi (divorced).

ADDRESSES:

Home—CA.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, literary agent, and memoirist. Publishers Weekly editor.

WRITINGS:

Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside (memoir), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Writer's Digest, Chicago Tribune, and Salon.com.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bridget Kinsella is a freelance writer, a literary agent, and an editor for the prominent book industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly. Once married to a man she described as the love of her life, Kinsella was devastated when he announced to her that he was gay. After their divorce, Kinsella sought a new beginning, leaving New York for California. There, she became a literary agent. At the request of a friend who taught writing, Kinsella agreed to look at a manuscript written by one of the teacher's more promising students. She was "astounded at the beauty of the prose," noted Terri Schlichenmayer in the Palo Alto Daily News, finding the work lyrical and powerful. To her surprise, Kinsella discovered that the writer, thirty-year-old Rory Mehan, was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in California's notorious maximum-security lockup, Pelican Bay State Prison. After corresponding with Mehan for almost a year, she became determined to meet the man who was the unlikely author of such beautiful prose, and she recounts her story in her memoir, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside.

Incarcerated since the age of nineteen, Mehan was a "novelist, philosopher, and doorway to a world Kinsella reveals in this book," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer, a sometimes tedious, longing, but often hopeful atmosphere in which the spouses, girlfriends, and children of jailed men keep vigil and wait for the next permitted visit or, in rare cases, a long-hoped-for release from prison. When she met him, Kinsella did not find a brutal, hardened criminal. Instead, Mehan was eloquent and graceful, altogether charming and bright. Kinsella describes how what began as friendship soon evolved into something much deeper, as she fell in love with Mehan despite the obstacles and the enormous cultural gulf between them. Both Kinsella and Mehan are sustained by their frequent letters and less-frequent visits. In the process, she begins to come to terms with her own notions of class and status, with her shattered marriage, and with the grim realization that she will likely never have the children she had once desperately wanted. In a Memoirville Web site interview, she described her relationship with Mehan as an "incredibly transforming experience," and noted that "we opened up to each other in a way that was incredibly healing to me and also to him."

Kinsella's experience also brought her into contact with many other women who love and wait for men behind bars, some of whom had married their spouses even after they were incarcerated. Though most had no hope for a traditional married relationship, their emotional attachments remained vitally important to them. She tells several of these women's stories along with her own, exploring the powerful emotional forces that drive women toward men in prison even as the specter of doomed relationships lingers in the background. Kinsella's involvement brought about profound changes: Mehan "taught me hope from a hopeless place," she remarked to Marie Claire interviewer Colleen Oakley.

"As she documents the startling and unlikely discovery of a soulmate behind bars, Kinsella examines how her heightened and constrained relationship with Rory helped her discover new depths of passion and compassion within herself," commented a Memoirville reviewer. When Kinsella writes about the many "hurdles of visiting a maximum-security prison and her life in limbo between visits, she is at her best," observed Frances Sandiford in Library Journal. Her work "does shed light on why certain vulnerable women are attracted to, fall in love with and even marry men behind bars," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Kinsella's account of her own experiences, and those of the other women she met, results in a "powerful story," remarked a writer in Publishers Weekly.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Kinsella, Bridget, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Glamour, July, 2007, Daryl Chen, "Love in Jail: One Woman's Story," review of Visiting Life, p. 30.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2007, review of Visiting Life.

Library Journal, May 15, 2007, Frances Sandiford, review of Visiting Life, p. 97.

Marie Claire, July, 2007, Colleen Oakley, "Books: Q&A: Bridget Kinsella, on Her Memoir Visiting Life," p. 106.

Palo Alto Daily News, August 3, 2007, Terri Schlichenmeyer, "Author Talks Love in and out of Jail," review of Visiting Life.

Publishers Weekly, March 19, 2007, review of Visiting Life, p. 51.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 21, 2007, Tom Levinson, "Lives in Limbo: A Memoir about Women Who Have Personal Relationships with Male Inmates," review of Visiting Life, p. 4.