The picture must give out light on its own, bodies have their own light that they exhaust in living. They burn away, they are unlighted.
Egon Schiele in a letter, 1912

Dust-Jacket Blurb

Joyce Carol Oates' The Rise of Life on Earth draws the reader into the secret life of Kathleen Hennessy, a nurse's aide who, as both martyr and avenging angel, is a memorable portrait of one of the "insulted and injured" of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen's violent childhood—shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder—and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Over-worked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

Excerpt

It was very early in the morning, a gauzy dawn, how unfair Kathleen was thinking that a soul should pass away at the very hour when a day was beginning and when, in another wing of the great hospital, new souls were being born.

She recalled suddenly the burning house, the asphalt siding you would not think would burn with such ferocity, like a comet fallen out of the sky the house was ablaze and all who watched were blameless, Kathleen Hennessy was surely blameless and never for a moment under suspicion and perhaps in fact it had not been she who'd dropped a lighted cigarette into a greasy rag so oddly hidden away in a closet at the front of the house perhaps it had been someone else entirely and even that other party blameless before the spectacle of God's wrath: of Death . . .

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