“Did you hear? America is closing the border. The U.S. Congress will stop accepting Soviet Jews: anyone who’s not registered in Vienna won’t be able to go to America.”
Batalion’s relationship with her mother was thwarted by walls—both the emotional walls of dealing with her mother’s underlying illness and the physical barriers built from piles of junk.
When Amber Tozer was 13, she and her best friend crawled out a window, met two boys at the tennis courts, and passed around a bottle of bourbon until Tozer felt like a superhero.
At 15, Judith A. Fisher began stealing her mother’s painkillers. One night, feeling particularly unloved by her parents, she leaves a note and swallows the pills, waking up later in the hospital
…The Lost Landscape has taught me that even literary titans are human beings underneath the hype, and they themselves can get lost when venturing into an unfamiliar genre.
Janet Sternburg’s White Matter (Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts, 2014) is a memoir of a family torn apart and brought together when two of its six children were given lobotomies.