Summary
After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie Oh--wife, mother, and outsider artist--has fallen in love with Viveca, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success. Annie and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's box of toxic secrets--dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.
We Are Water is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.
Walter (Wally) Lamb was born in Norwich, Connecticut on October 17, 1950. He attended the University of Connecticut, receiving a B.A. in 1972 and an M.A. in 1977; he also earned an M.F.A. from Vermont College in 1984.
Lamb has written numerous short stories, most notably "Astronauts", which received both the Pushcart Prize and the University of Missouri's William Peden Prize in 1990. He is also the author of the bestselling novels She's Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed and We Are Water.
Lamb writes stories, he says, because he sometimes hears another voice in his head and feels the need to tell that character's story. He made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title We are Water. However, he feels an equally strong calling to teach, and has no plans to become a fulltime writer. He has taught English at the Norwich Free Academy since 1972, and for many years directed the Academy's writing center, which he also played a major role in creating. The idea for it developed as he became more involved in fiction writing himself and realized that the common methods of teaching composition, which involved grading a paper and commenting on it after the student was finished, were not particularly helpful. He set up a program that allowed students to get feedback from both teachers and peers early in the writing process, so that they could incorporate the suggestions into their final work. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut. He is also the volunteer facilitator of a writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution.
(Bowker Author Biography)
