🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

A searing, heartfelt memoir that feels like it was written as much for the author, as for the reader.

For how else does one, who has felt the inexplicable need to express herself, in words, (written or otherwise), from a very early age, make sense of whole-scale tragedies impossible to reconcile. In this case, the author has faced the suicides of two beloveds, — that of her father, at an early age, to be only followed by her sister, years later.

As the author turns to others for guidance, (poets, authors, philosophers) so she works to untangle cosmic questions, the first being the foundational mystery of why she is driven to write.

Is writing transformative? Helpful? Or is it, as the author seems to feel, shameful, a ‘less-than’ unstoppable coping mechanism indicative of weakness of some sort.

Herself a mother; a daughter to an indomitable, Scrabble-loving, elderly mother; an ex-wife; and a grandmother to spirited, always questioning grandchildren; — the author is at core also a woman with a past and her own reconciling.

Suffering from panic attacks, driven by emotional chasms impossible to master, the author’s words are an outpouring, — of love, grief, confusion, anguish, compulsion — so raw they are almost too much for a reader to bear.

Could it be that ‘Writing’, like ‘Wind’ (a topic which bears a fascination for the author that borders on obsessional), she reasons, expresses pure energy, stripping the bones of physicality raw, and transforming it all into something deeper, — something the essence of ‘Real’.

Something to counter ‘Silence’— the achingly terrifying tool used by both her father and sister — a first step manifested in their act of letting go.

This book made me cry, but also, deep in my heart, to celebrate. Celebrate our very humanness, our connections, as we reach to understand worlds that are bigger than we are.

A great big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.