Sanctuary

A Memoir

De: Emily Rapp Black

Narrado por: Emily Rapp Black

Duración: 7 h y 12 m

Resumen del Editor

“[An] often beautiful jewel of a book... Black’s power as a writer means she can take us with her to places that normally our minds would refuse to go.” (The New York Times Book Review - Editors’ Choice)

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Still Point of the Turning World comes an incisive memoir about how she came to question and redefine the concept of resilience after the trauma of her first child’s death.

“Congratulations on the resurrection of your life”, a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly: She left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son’s illness, got remarried to a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind - that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she still carried so much of her old story with her. More to the point, she wanted to carry it with her. Everyone she met told her she was resilient, strong, courageous in ways they didn’t think they could be. But what did those words mean, really?

This book is an attempt to unpack the various notions of resilience that we carry as a culture. Drawing on contemporary psychology, neurology, etymology, literature, art, and self-help, Emily Rapp Black shows how we need a more complex understanding of this concept when applied to stories of loss and healing and overcoming the odds, knowing that we may be asked to rebuild and reimagine our lives at any moment, and often when we least expect it. Interwoven with lyrical, unforgettable personal vignettes from her life as a mother, wife, daughter, friend, and teacher, Rapp Black creates a stunning tapestry that is full of wisdom and insight.

©2021 Emily Rapp Black (P)2021 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A celebration of love, and life...as well as an investigation of what it means to be human.... Black’s voice is singularly lyrical, singularly bracing. She is obsessed with the potency of language, offering favorite phrases and lines, sometimes contextualizing but more often quoting with the confidence of a reader who has made the sentences her own.” (Alta)

“A book of rare power and grace.... Reading this extraordinarily thoughtful writer and her luminous prose was, for me, sanctuary.” (Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club)

“Sanctuary opens up the space between life and death in order to show us how love gets born over and over again - a fierce and unflinching love, a love that has to travel trauma and truth to evolve. Emily Rapp Black’s book is a precise and complex articulation of a journey that has nothing to do with the puny hero’s journey. It’s bigger than that. It’s the story of the relationship between creation and decreation as it lives in the bodies of women. This book will give us better ways to tell the stories of motherhood, desire, despair, resistance, and resilience. This book will change lives.” (Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children)

Poetic Exploration of Grief

Not what I expected, but an enriching experience. The author explores the inexpressible grief of losing a child with candor and searing honesty.