Listening Well
Bringing Stories of Hope to Life
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestselling author Heather Morris comes the memoir of a life of listening to others.
In Listening Well, Heather will explore her extraordinary talents as a listener—a skill she employed when she first met Lale Sokolov, the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the inspiration for her bestselling novel. It was this ability that led Lale to entrust Heather with his story, which she told in her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz and the bestselling follow up, Cilka's Journey.
Now Heather shares the story behind her inspirational writing journey and the defining experiences of her life, including her profound friendship with Lale, and explores how she learned to really listen to the stories people told her—skills she believes we can all learn.
"Stories are what connect us and remind us that hope is always possible."—Heather Morris
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exquisite work, novelist Morris (Three Sisters) makes an impassioned case for the value of spoken history. Crediting her success as a novelist to the "privilege of hearing stories," she offers readers a personal look at the real-life stories behind her books, each of which juxtaposed moving tales of survival with the devastation of the Holocaust. Revisiting her 2018 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which fictionalized the story of her friend Lale Sokolov, a tattooist at the death camp, Morris recounts the heartbreak she felt hearing Sokolov speak of looking into the "frightened eyes" of "the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen" as he tattooed numbers on her arm. Cilka's Journey (2019), meanwhile, tells a version of the life of Cilka Klein, a Holocaust survivor and friend of Sokolov's late wife, Gita. As she evokes in vivid prose these affecting tales, Morris coaches readers on how to dive into the history of those in their own lives, with tips on listening to aging family members. "Many will need some persuasion," she writes, "and some may not feel that they have anything exceptional to pass on. But I disagree: each of us has lived a unique life." Weaving spectacular storytelling with wise advice, this underscores the beauty of slowing down in an age of distraction.
