Birth of the Cool, a compilation album by jazz great Miles Davis, was released in 1957, the year before I was born. That album defined “cool jazz”: elegant, distant, hip, and stylish. Davis and his eight co- musicians made it all look so easy. From the time I was very young, I was trying to be as cool as Davis’s jazz: aloof, intellectual, desired, mysterious, alluring, and perfect. Only in my fifties did I understand that I had to relinquish this striving and rebirth the uncool parts of me—those bits that are sentimental, awkward, and vulnerable. This book is an eclectic and uncoolly accessible collection of musings on motherhood, childhood, recovery, faith, and love.

Madeline Walker is a writer and academic writing instructor at the School of Nursing at the University of Victoria. Her first book, The Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Auto- biography, 1965-2002, was published in 2011. Her work has also been published in Room, University of Toronto Review, the Journal for Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and English Studies in Canada. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her husband and two cats.

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