Tag: memoir

August 25, 2023December 6, 2023

Things I saw at home.

Again from KK’s list of Scintillating Sentences. It was shocking, painful, and scary to watch the way some healthcare workers treated my parents and other elders. I love to see elderhood revered and cherished, while I know some older people still need to earn the status of mature elder. No matter our age, we deserve vital respectful healthcare, the kind that helps us stay fully alive while we are still here. Remember how being a senior in high school was cool? Let’s think about seniors in life that way, too. Seniors at living, soon-to-be graduates from the school of life. They know stuff and can teach us things. We are all at home, going home, and need help.

Available wherever books are sold.

You, too?

This one, too, is on KK’s list of Scintillating Sentences. I love it when I learn that someone loves a sentence I considered taking out and finally left in.

Available wherever books are sold.

I am home. at the piscina, near the handstand.

“Sometimes you have to flip things around,” this reader said when I told him I loved the handstand in the background of this shot.

I love hearing from readers who are reading near water, in the water, in between swims, doing and watching handstands. It fits the book so well.

“I just finished your I am home.,” he wrote earlier, “which I started last night in bed after years of ‘not’ reading books. It demands a lot of bravery to expose your soul this way! I liked your ‘not mentioning’ any names in this book so the focus is elsewhere. I am really astonished at what a great writer and storyteller you are! I will now surely go for your first, Lucy, go see…”

(see p.108 in the book to understand the full context of the nots in these comments)

Available wherever books are sold.

I am home. in time.

More from KK’s Scintillating Sentences list.

August 16, 2023August 16, 2023

Some people think I’m rich…

Another from KK’s Scintillating Sentences List.

Available wherever books are sold.

August 10, 2023August 10, 2023

A question from home.

From KK’s list of Scintillating Sentences.

And here is one from my list of favorite songs by Robbie Robertson.

I am home. in great hands.

Montse “…loved the storyline, the way it was written and presented. Very easy to read, and you are hooked from the very first page!

Marianne’s writing is simply yummy, and extremely entertaining.

I thoroughly enjoyed every page of it and would highly recommend it to everyone.

I am home. is a must-read.”

August 7, 2023August 26, 2023

Scintillating Sentences

“Scintillating Sentences” is what one reader calls the three-page list of sentences she underlined as she read, and then sent to me. Rather than posting them all at once, I think I will share them one at a time when the feeling hits. The one I have chosen for today makes me feel good and reminds me it can be a prayer. I remember the wonder of hearing myself say it out loud. And later, the realization that came after writing it, looking at it on the page, and knowing that was the first time in my life I felt that. I love revision. Re-vision. That great gift writing gives us to look at what we have to say again and to see it in new ways. This simple 14-word sentence is a prism through which to consider love, divinity, body, woman, and human. The scene in which it is uttered evokes the gratitude the narrator feels for what her body does for her, what it tells her, how it helps her. The body is active, the body is divine, the body is a messenger.

“Beyond brava!!! So so moving in myriad meandering meaning-filled ways,” the reader wrote at the top of the list.

Where the Atlantic Ocean merges with the Caribbean Sea, I am home. with Lucy, go see.

Another reader in Florida sent this image from Miami Beach. She read I am home. first and that made her want to read Lucy, go see. and tell her friends to read them both, too. “Your writing is superb. Your metaphors are really unique and lovely. I had a great time. Honestly didn’t want the books to end. I think they should be movies.”

August 4, 2023August 4, 2023

I am home. in Florida.

A reader sent this photo from Miami and it has left me speechless for a while. I think about motherhood when I look at it. Then I look at the breasts of what appears to be a child because of its size and what seems to be a breast-less woman holding her, and why do I think it is a woman? Because of the shape of the waist and the hips. And that breastlessness makes me think of St. Agatha. And then there is the size of the feet and I am home., a traveling book, at the feet, of this image of bigness seemingly protecting smallness. And this makes me think of another reader’s comment about how the book is about the extraordinary of the ordinary, though this image is hardly ordinary. I could probably ask someone who knows. Look at it, though, above all, headless. Headless. What happens when we lose our heads? Or when we get out of our heads and decide to live with the body and place less focus on the mind? We each have our own answers to these questions that I like to think about when I look at this image. I am home. is filled with similar questions and occasional attempts to answer them. In this way, it is also about acceptance of things as they are. It can also be a statement about being home anywhere in any way.

And when I look at it, for some reason, this sentence that many readers have liked from I am home. floats into my mind: These three bodies-the one I came from, mine, and the one I gave life to-all connect to one happiness.