Nola
A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his older sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. Armed with these types of clues, Hemley quickly discovers that finding the truth in any life—even one’s own—is a fragmented and complex task.
Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for finding and understanding God; it is also a quest to understand what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator.
Upon its first release in 1998, Nola won ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award for biography/memoir, the Washington State Book Award for biography/memoir, and the Independent Press Book Award for autobiography/memoir.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A diagnosed schizophrenic, Nola Hemley died in 1973 of a medication overdose at the age of 25. In this affecting, highly inventive memoir, Hemley's younger half-brother, a creative writing teacher and the author of Turning Life into Fiction, attempts to understand what led his gifted sister down the path toward mental illness, drawing on her journals and artwork as well as his own memories of her. There are, he discovers, no obvious answers, and his frustration in trying to comprehend the workings of Nola's mind is palpable: "Whatever I say condemns her, romanticizes her, lies about her, idolizes her, but never, never recreates her in all her complexity." Perhaps that's why the book keeps veering away from its ostensible subject to tell the story of the author's own childhood and to explore his parents' lives. In the end, Hemley's strikingly, often fascinatingly, postmodern narrative tells us more about the challenges and ramifications of writing a personal memoir than about its subject's life. Readers in search of an in-depth account of a family's struggle with mental illness may come away frustrated by Hemley's sometimes oblique treatment of this theme, but those interested in writing as a process will find his articulate musings amply rewarding.
