Eliza Factor is the author of two novels, Love Maps and The Mercury Fountain, and the memoir Strange Beauty: A Portrait of My Son. She is the founder of Extreme Kids & Crew, a nonprofit community center that connects families raising children with disabilities through the arts and play. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York and Dublin, New Hampshire.
Jill Grinberg
A unique and hopeful story of how one woman and her family were transformed by her child’s multiple disabilities and inability to talk and how she, in turn, transformed a community.
This intimate, no-holds barred memoir shares one family’s experiences with a child who is both autistic and physically disabled. It is a story of infectious laughter, blood on the floor, intense physical conflict, and of two little girls growing up in the shadow of their charming and fitful brother. And it is the story of a mother and writer and the illuminating effect of imagining the world through the eyes of her beautiful, charismatic, and nonverbal son, Felix.
Felix and his sisters inspire Eliza to start Extreme Kids, a community center that connects families with children with disabilities through the arts and play, and transform how she saw herself and the world. She writes of the joy this project brings her, as well as the disconnect of being lauded for helping others at the same time that she cannot help her own son.
As Felix grows bigger and stronger, his assaults against himself grow more destructive. When his bruised limbs and face prompt Child Services to investigate the Factors for abuse, Eliza realizes how dangerous her home has become.
Strange Beauty is a personal story, but it shines a light on the combustible conditions many families are living in at this moment. The United States offers parents whose children are prone to violence very little help. That Eliza’s story ends happily, with Felix thriving at Crotched Mountain School, is due more to luck than policy. There are few such schools and many such children.
When children are violent, we fail to account for the internal and external pressures that lead to violence. This is both cruel and counterproductive, for people with disabilities have much to teach us, if we will only listen.
Praise for Strange Beauty
“An aching, raw, honest, exquisitely written memoir of art, parenting, and the unexpected places life takes you.” –Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter
“So moving and thought provoking about the deepest things: the value of life, the varieties of communication… beautiful.” –Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch
Parallax Press
August 22, 2017
Adult
Nonfiction/Memoir
JGLM
The love in Love Maps is not the kind associated with domestic bliss; it is the kind that bubbles up at inopportune moments, attaching itself to people who might be better off free, causing mayhem and longing, along with moments of rare beauty. The title is taken from a series of paintings by Sarah Marker, an artist who ekes out a living teaching humanities at a fancy high school in Connecticut.
The story begins when Sarah receives a letter from Philip, her erstwhile husband. They have lived separately for seven years, without having seen each other once, without having formally severed ties, in a state of sustained ambivalence. Now he wants to visit. As much as Sarah would like to see him, she is terrified at what he will do when he discovers that he has a son.
Sarah bundles up her son and once again takes flight, only to arrive in a place she had not intended. While navigating the terrain of the 1980s art scene in New York City, she must confront the terrible events surrounding Philip’s departure, and reconcile the expectations of domestic life with her own fractured experience of family, confronting the violence and aching love at the heart of this story.
Praise for Love Maps
“Powerfully written….Factor reveals this arresting tale through solid character development and a well-paced narrative. From its tense opening chapter to its memorable conclusion, this is a read-in-one-sitting trip.” –Publishers Weekly
“Memorable and touching…a commendable achievement that captures the interrelation of fear and love in the unbalanced reality of modern adulthood.” –San Francisco Book Review
Akashic Books
May 5, 2015
Adult
Fiction
Set in a remote stretch of desert near the border of West Texas and Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century, this story follows the pursuits of Owen Scraperton as he struggles to establish Pristina, a utopian community based on mercury mining that aims to resolve the great questions of labor and race.
As age, love, and experience cause Owen to modify his original vision, his fiercely idealistic daughter Victoria remains true to Pristina’s founding principles—setting them up for a major conflict that captures the imagination of the entire town. The Mercury Fountain combines realistic modern writing with elements from American and Greco-Roman mythology, taking its cue from Mercury, the most slippery and mischievous of gods, who rules over science, commerce, eloquence, and thievery.
Praise for The Mercury Fountain
“Factor develops her characters in entertaining ways while building a novel of social realism.” –Kirkus
“Eliza Factor’s first novel, The Mercury Fountain, explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people. Though the action takes place between 1900 and 1923, the resonances feel alarmingly contemporary . . . Factor counters convention with a sharp sense of character, evocative subplots and the dangerous allure of mercury itself.” –The New York Times Book Review
Akashic Books
February 28, 2012
Adult
Fiction
