Waterbaby A Novel

As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water and was crowned a hero. Tam was labelled 'disabled' and never swam again. Thus begins 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body to betray her, never allowing her family to influence her path. Now, in middle age, a lifetime's worth of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where she falls under the spell of two dead women. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam relives her own life over and over.

Cris Mazza is the author of Charlatan: New and Selected Stories and Waterbaby. Additionally, Mazza has sixteen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.