Truitt’s
last journal, published after her death, harvests a sculptor’s long lifetime, paying attention to the experience of living: working, creating, family and
friendship, loving and losing, and aging and death.
A renowned sculptor, although
increasingly frail as she ages, she never stops creating. Instead, she adjusts
the scale of her work, yielding, and accepting the limits of her aging body. As a
young woman, she chose to be a sculptor rather than a writer but is a close
observer and exquisite describer of everything she encounters, including weather,
great art, history, family dynamics, and personalities.
I live just blocks from
her former home and studio. It is inspiring to be able to walk to the alley
behind her house and imagine her at work in her backyard studio.
Named by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in Anne Truitt's remarkable series of journals
"Impressive. . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence."-Publishers Weekly
"Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths. . . . A model of discipline…
Exploring
Oslo this summer, we stumbled upon an intriguing statue of Sigrid Undset, a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Her epic family trilogy of medieval Norway has never been out of print.
I began reading it
on our flight back to the States. The flight flew by. The book casts a spell,
transporting the reader back in time. Undset weaves a vivid tapestry of
Medieval Norway as she tells the story. The historical detail is specific and
beautifully realized but never reads like “research,” which I admired as a
novelist as well as a reader. The characters’ circumstances are determined by
the times, but their passions, yearnings, joys, and sorrows are universal.
'[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante' -Slate
The Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece by Norway's literary master
Kristin Lavransdatter is the epic story of one woman's life in fourteenth-century Norway, from childhood to death. Sensitive and rebellious Kristin is sent to a convent as a girl, where she meets the charming but irresponsible Erlend. Defying her parents' wishes to pursue her own desires, she marries and raises seven sons. However, her husband's political ambitions threaten catastrophe for the family, and the couple become increasingly estranged as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty.
With its captivating heroine and emotional potency,…
A review copy of JoelF. Johnson’s debut novel, came to me this
spring in advance of publication. Sadly, I did not have time to read it. Months
later, I rediscovered it in my book basket. A lucky find!
Johnson
tells a retrospective coming-of-age story set in a fictional Southern town
during the Civil Rights movement. The narrator, now elderly and
living in Boston, flashes back to the transformative summer when he first began
to recognize his own privilege and unthinking prejudice, his father’s racism, and his mother’s quiet defiance.
This novel is a subtle, nuanced story. The
characters are unique, and the issues they wrestle with are timely and relevant. Book
groups seeking an engaging novel to provoke meaningful discussion should add this book to their schedule.
“Those were just the times.” That’s how Morris “Little” Nickerson has always chosen to describe the incongruities of his childhood in the segregated south. But when a call from his older sister prompts Little, who is now in his seventies, to return to his hometown of LaSalle, Georgia, he finds himself having to reexamine the childhood he's kept encased in glass all these years.
As he tries to make sense of the events of one particularly eventful summer, Little tells of Reverend Robert McAllister, the father of his best friend, who speaks the high-flown language of social change but preaches…
My novel is inspired by renowned psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and her custom-built cottage on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium.
Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, Frieda came to the Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. She established the Lodge’s reputation for innovative treatment of mental illness, dying in her cottage under mysterious circumstances in 1957. Decades later, psychotherapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick live in Frieda’s Cottage, next to the closed and abandoned hospital. Eliza feels Frieda’s lingering influence and develops a relationship with her ghostly mentor.
Frieda’s Songexplores how the work, the people, and the homes we love shape our lives. The abandoned hospital burned, but Frieda’s Cottage next door remained, and I, a psychotherapist and author, began this novel.
