Girl Behind the Door opens with the renegade Iowa farm girl who ran away to New York City to be a writer returning home to find her dying, nearly 100-year-old mother lying naked on a bed in the Memory Care Unit of a nursing home. Despite the haunting beauty of Dickinson’s language, naked is possibly the best way to describe her prose. Naked emotion. Naked observation. The warts and the pimples of living presented with the same intensity and honesty as the finely curved hips and thick auburn hair that give life its pleasure. No one writes like Stephanie Dickinson, except maybe God.

Alice Jurish

The great state of Iowa has raised many chickens, but Stephanie Dickinson sure as rain isn’t one of them. Bravely tackling the complex nature of the mother-daughter relationship through all of its peaks and valleys, Dickinson’s memorable prose will by turns amuse you, wrench your heart, and curl your toes. Dickinson provides us with a panoply of object lessons; most notably, how, at the moments that really count, rebelliousness turns to tenderness and we tightly clutch our familial cords and connections, even while butting heads with them. In Girl Behind the Door, we learn that the landscape from which this fiercely passionate writer hails possesses the best soil on earth, and Stephanie Dickinson has dug deeply into the muck and mire to unearth her past—and, in doing so, ours.

Cindy Hochman, author of Habeas Corpus

As a teenager she decided to fly. Her mother’s old Rambler with her at the wheel crested the hill, with grave consequences. In Girl Behind the Door, Stephanie Dickinson flies on every page. What a book! A delicious memoir, or deathwatch, in which death dies. Florence, her mother, lives. Iowa lives, all “the gone ones.” We know her childhood better than we know our own, the Bureshes and Teleckys better than our own relatives. A read with moist eyes. Unflagging emotion and exquisite clarity, incredible candor and perspicacity, her signature poetry. It is brave, naked as her dementia mother. Our eyes are wet and our hearts are full. It is a farewell that makes you hungry for life. She heaps our plates.

Jill Hoffman, author of Jilted and No Other Way

In Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, Stephanie Dickinson becomes the voice of a legendary movie star and the last All-American girl Jean Seberg. Written as a fictional interview, no question is off-limits (French husbands, love with a Black Panther, alcoholism, death of a child, suicide). The imaginary answers are real and haunting as they pull you into a fascinating world of the 1960s. Dickinson skillfully draws on her own Midwestern childhood and with heart-rending imagery gives us a portrait of a dreamy teenager in Marshalltown who "watched the bluegill bite the hook's surprise," a girl who could never shrug off her small-town roots even as she embraced the Paris life of celebrity. Every page is a story, an inner dialogue, a provocative meditation on Hollywood that is "no Babylonian Talmud," on beauty that "isn't a marzipan cookie," on destiny "you're whatever the script asks, lily or green toad." Dickinson has written a book of such depth, knowledge and sensitivity that it should be considered the star's authorized biography because had Jean Seberg read this she would have cried with joy at the prospect of finally being understood.

Marina Rubin, author of Stealing Cherries, Logic and Ode to Hotels

Life's an existential journey for Jean Seberg. It's not easy being a seething adolescent sex-pot, a free-love heroine of French New Wave films and Black Panthers, a mother, not to mention Joan of Arc burning at a funeral pyre under the direction of Otto Preminger. A film director or critic cuts through the fine façade between life onstage and off -- killing and resurrecting. "What's real is make-believe..." just as this interview is. Dickinson's great talent lies not in writing about Jean Seberg but in occupying that space between her spirit and her flesh. Dickinson speaks Seberg, sees Seberg, savors the humiliation of brutish critics until it sours, has felt heavy make up melting on her face, heard the sobs of butterflies alighting in her body's crevices, felt the heat rise from her torched costume, been trapped in a sack, taken to the anvil, hammered. Even then, says Seberg-Dickinson, "I'm deep in the sky. Alive."

Maria Lisella, author of Two Naked Feet, Amore on Hope St. and Thieves in the Family

Read an EXCERPT at the Pithead Chapel website where it was voted 'Best of the Net'.