Books
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.
A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World
This beautifully written exploration of “the unusual abilities of those who are differently wired” (Psychology Today) received a Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for outstanding literary contribution to the world of mental health.
Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
Body Toxic is an environmental memoir: A harrowing story of an immigrant family in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey–a hauntingly beautiful, hauntingly compromised landscape. With incalculable sadness, Susanne Antonetta presents families lost in the midst of the American dream.
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.