Solace
Rituals of Loss and Desire
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
NPR commentator Mary Sojourner, "a pithy yet sensuous, spiritual yet ferocious writer" (Booklist), delivers a powerful memoir about the joys of rejecting the pace, addictions, and false values of society...and learning to live without compromise.
Twenty years ago, Mary Sojourner was a mental health consultant and counselor in Rochester, New York, a divorced mother of three, longing for her real work, her real home. She found it in Flagstaff, Arizona, in a remote two-room cabin that had no running water and only a wood stove for heat, but offered Sojourner everything she needed in terms of light, beauty, joy, and the perfect setting for writing and reconnecting.
Solace is a book about obsession and release, and the lifelong search for balance in a world revolving around appetite and acceleration. Written in short, beautifully crafted pieces, the book carries the reader through Sojourner's life, from a restrained Catholic childhood to the excesses of her generation, through motherhood and divorce to her quiet, solitary existence in the Southwest, where she has learned the importance of living at the right pace.
Sojourner's voice is as compelling on the page as it is on the radio -- lively, funny, moving, combining the outspoken out-of-stepness of Anne Lamott with the environmental activism and poetic prose of Terry Tempest Williams. In chapters with titles such as "God Is Coming and She Is Pissed" and "How to Leave: Leave," her vivid personality, passion, and sense of humor come through. This is a book for women everywhere -- those who recognize their own truths in Mary's life and younger readers who will find inspiration in her hard-won wisdom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NPR contributor Sojourner writes about her life from a "scrap-and-wallboard" cabin with no running water near Flagstaff, Ariz. She shepherds readers from her difficult girlhood with a mentally ill mother through the birth of her children and her discovery of feminism to a mature adulthood pocked with unhealthy relationships to men, alcohol, her computer and slot machines. Along the way, Sojourner, originally from Pennsylvania, finds a love for the American Southwest, moves there, then chafes at all the other newcomers who she believes are ruining the landscape and the environment. The result is a book that addresses the author's addictions, environmental activism and progression of messy relationships. Alas, Sojourner does not fully develop any of these threads. Moreover, rather than illustrating her life with stories, Sojourner reports, without meaty narrative backup (e.g., she glosses over the collapse of her first marriage: "I had sleepwalked and jangled my way through the earlier marriage to the college poet and, in an act more merciful then I understood, left him and our baby. I had fled to a new man, and when he left, run straight into the second marriage"). The book vacillates between periods of despair and epiphanies that soon evaporate (e.g., as Sojourner is trying to quit spending so much time on the Internet and return to writing, she notes, "Words spilled from the pool of witness and recollection. And as they emptied out, I felt full. For a while"). Still, Sojourner's passion, prickly vulnerability and deep humanity are engaging when taken in small, essay-sized bites.
