REVIEW: Held: Essays in Belonging by Kathryn Nuernberger

Reviewed by Lara Lillibridge

I was first captivated by Kathryn Nuernberger’s smart, lyrical prose when I read The Witch of Eye. I loved how she connected history to the present, and made me think of things through a different lens. Her latest book, Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande Books; 2025), is even richer in connecting the personal to the universal.

“I am out here in the gray light of morning, on my hands and knees in the backyard weeds, trying to hold a leaf beneath my pocket microscope, because I think maybe there is something I can understand about losing and holding on.”

Held is a lyrical collection of brief essays ruminating on mutualism, grief, and a deep love for the sacredness of the earth, and the desire to preserve it. Nuernberger reflects on being stalked by a student, and how the system failed them both, the death of a child, and our place in community with each other and all the microsystems that make up the planet on which we live.

“Sometimes people say everything happens for a reason, which I can’t believe. But everything that happens does make something else happen, whether I believe it or not.”

Held is a smart book, intermingling facts with personal narrative, yet Nuernberger remains humble in her reflections. It is an attempt to make sense of the world as she travels with her family from the Arctic Circle to Hawaii, with many stops in-between.

“I collect a lot of facts because I think they might fit each other and also maybe me to the universe, but my poor dumb brain just can’t come up with how.[…] I collect a lot of facts because when I see you and you ask me how things are, I can tell you what I have been learning as a way of confessing the parts I don’t otherwise know how to say.”

I learned many fascinating things, like the fact that Volta invented the battery to experiment with reanimating dead things, or that narwhals hate the sound of boats. I learned about the ecosystems of moss and about trying to survive the heartbreaks of the world, from the loss of a child you were responsible for, to the potential demise of all starfish. Yet it is deeply personal.

As a mother responsible for keeping little people safe, as a resident of the earth, which humankind seems intent on killing, reading this book made me feel seen, understood.  Nuernberger is grappling with the life and death questions we all have to contend with, and while she doesn’t hold up an answer, in the search we find the connection. She shows us proof in the mutualism of tiny creatures that sustain each other — even if there is no greater meaning, no higher power, no inherent destiny or fate, there is this undisputable symbiotic relationship between living things. We can only hope that is enough to sustain us.