The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

Part family and personal memoir, part investigation into what science can tell us about consciousness and reality, Susanne Antonetta’s The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here is a book that unfolds multiple stories in lyric pieces. It juxtaposes the history of a family that encompasses addiction and mental illness with the questions raised by the author’s Christian Scientist and spiritualist grandmother May: what is consciousness? Does Mind create the world, or does the world create it? What is death? 

Antonetta uses memoir to explore the cutting edge of today’s consciousness studies and theoretical physics, even visiting psychics, one of whom seems truly able to see. She interviews leading scientists about questions that arise from her grandmother’s beliefs, including the reality of time, with all the related implications for life and death. Other questions deal with consciousness and its tricky relationship with reality. 

Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts

Entangled Objects is a kinetic, episodic novel in which the story of three very different yet interconnected women weave in and out and move, like particles held in quantum entanglement, inexorably together.  First comes Fan, an adjunct professor, daughter of a coal miner, who moves to Korea where her husband gets caught trying to publish falsified cloning research while she becomes enmeshed in an affair. Next up is Filomena, a maid who begins to steal clothing from the rooms of wealthy guests, dressing up and haunting the hotel where she works. Finally, there is Cate, a reality star who manages her own career and that of her family, orchestrating fights, drunken binges, and publicly parading her own griefs. 

All three characters confront these questions: when are we most ourselves, when we realize the selves we aspire to, or when we are unadorned? What does it mean to live an authentic life, and to deal ethically with others in the world? The characters converge on the same place: Filomena’s hotel. The three point-of-view characters come together, after which each will come away changed.

Make Me A Mother: A Memoir

In Make Me a Mother, acclaimed memoirist Susanne Antonetta adopts an infant from Seoul, South Korea. After meeting their six-month-old son, Jin, at the airport—an incident made memorable when Susanne, so eager to meet her son, is chased down by security—Susanne and her husband learn lessons common to all parents, such as the lack of sleep and the worry and joy of loving a child. They also learn lessons particular to their own family: not just how another being can take over your life but how to let an entire culture in, how to discuss birth parents who gave up a child, and the tricky steps required to navigate race in America.

In the end, her relationship with her son teaches Susanne to understand her own troubled childhood and to forgive and care for her own aging parents. Susanne comes to realize how, time and time again, all families have to learn to adopt one another.

Curious Atoms: A History with Physics (chapbook)

A mother’s death, the seesawing of her bipolar universe, a child growing up and away, even an encounter with a famous actress at an airport—memoirist Susanne Paola Antonetta confronts these and other predicaments, never forgetting all the while that here, “in the quantum universe, time runs both forward and backward, and matter doesn’t actually exist until it’s observed.” Curious Atoms: A History with Physics challenges the premises of memoir with the premises of the cosmos: like matter and antimatter, one always almost but not quite annihilating the other.

Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction

I coauthored this nonfiction writing handbook and textbook with Brenda Miller. The third edition includes the text and writing prompts of the first edition, along with new sections on hypertext, blogging, multimedia, a step-by-step guide to publishing both individual essays and books, and much much more. A book website that contains essays, sample syllabi and other materials can be found here.