This month’s Spotlight:
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, And Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
A must-read for anyone whose life has been touched by trauma in any way. For me, trauma came in the immediate aftermath of my husband’s suicide. For my husband, the trauma of priest abuse scarred and eventually killed him. Our four children were each impacted by our trauma.
Here, an ongoing list of the authors and books that keep me thinking and writing, those that inspire in me the courage to TELL (in alphabetized order by genre, sort of):
Creative Nonfiction
Emily Bernard
Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine
UVM colleague, Bernard, writes about her own “hunger to tell” and quotes James Baldwin: “For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all the darkness.”
Bernard’s own lesson in writing her memoir (of sorts) is this:
“in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself.”
Jill Bialosky
History of a Suicide: my sister’s unfinished life
I relate all too well with Bialosky’s thoughts and feelings about her sister’s suicide. “The dialogue we have with the dead is never ending,” she writes. “How had I let her disappear from view? How had we let her go?” These are the questions I’ve asked for decades now following my late husband’s death. There is never a single or a simple answer. But questions like these propelled and led me to the recent discovery of his priest abuse.
Sven Birkerts
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
My Blue Sky Trades
The Other Walk
Eula Biss
On Immunity: An Innoculation
Greg Bottoms
Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent Into Madness
I could not stop reading this book, devoured it in two days. This work of creative nonfiction could be given the subtitle “Brave Heart” because this author’s and fellow UVM colleague of mine’s telling is so bold. He does as intended: captures the experience of schizophrenia, his brother’s, with heartbreaking honesty. With my memoir Tell, I can only hope to come close to doing the same.
Bottoms renders the feeling of acute guilt, the kind he experienced when he realized his brother’s psychological problems were much more than simply a drug problem, that he had a disease: paranoid schizophrenia. “It’s the opposite of relief and elation,” he writes. “Fear is transient. Guilt, believe me, lingers.” This is how I felt when I discovered long after the fact a contributing factor to my late husband’s suicide by digging up the truth that Peter had been abused by a priest.
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Mary Cregan
The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Blue Nights
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (essays)
The White Album (essays)
Play It As It Lays (fiction)
Mark Doty
Heaven’s Coast, a memoir
Andre Dubus III
Townie
House of Sand and Fog (fiction)
Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Her TED Talk: Your elusive genius
https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius/transcript?language=en#t-2169
Lucy Grealy
Autobiography of a Face
Richard Hoffman
Half the House
Kay Redfield Jamison
An Unquiet Mind
Night Falls Fast
Setting the River on Fire
See her informative talk, “Robert Lowell, Biography, and Psychopathology” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOJ35cE54LI
Mary Karr
The Art of Memoir
The Liars Club
Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird: Lessons on Writing and Life
Plan B: further thoughts on faith
Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
Dinah Lenney
Bigger Than Life
The Objects Parade
ALexandra Marzano Lesnevich
The Fact of a Body
Phillip Lopate
The Art of the Personal Essay (editor)
Getting Personal
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction
John McPhee
Draft No. 4
Joyce Carol Oates
A Widow’s Story
We Were the Mulvaneys (fiction)
Gregory Orr
The Blessing
Saint Augustine
The Confessions
Dani Shapiro
Still Writing
Rebecca Skloot
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Cheryl Strayed
Tiny Beautiful Things
Wild
Twyla Tharpe
The Creative Habit
Abigail Thomas
Safekeeping
A Three Dog Life
Thinking About Memoir
John Edgar Wideman
Brothers and Keepers
Terry Tempest Williams
Refuge
An Unspoken Hunger
Finding Beauty in a Broken World
Fiction
Anne Enright
The Gathering
In this stunning work of fiction, the narrator’s brother, Liam, has died by suicide. She writes, “I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden conviction that uncertainty spawns.” She writes of “a grief that is almost genital.” And later in the book, states how, “Suicides always pull a good crowd. People push in: they clog the doors and sidle along the back benches, gathering on the rim of the church: they turn up on principal, because a suicide has left everyone behind.”
Such as it was with my late husband’s funeral
at the Richmond Congregational Church.
Toni Morrison
Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Tim O’Brien
The Things They Carried
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
Donna Tartt
The Secret History
Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life
Poetry
Donald Hall
Without
The Painted Bed
Sharon Olds
The Gold Cell
Mary Oliver
Red Bird
From “Sometimes”:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Upstream (essays)
Sylvia Plath
The Colossus
The Letters of Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar (fiction, or is it?)
Books July 10, 1971 Issue
Dying: An Introduction
Read poet Howard’s Moss take on The Bell Jar here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/07/10/dying-an-introduction-howard-moss
Adrienne Rich
The Dream of a Common Language
Anne Sexton
The Complete Works