Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

memoir

“Street Without a Name” by Kapka Kassabova

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Subtitle: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria

Recommended to me by: Ceil Wirth on the EEFC mailing list

Kapka Kassabova’s chilling, yet engaging, personal memoir of growing up in communist Bulgaria, and then returning to visit shortly after Bulgaria joined the European Union. The characters are finely drawn, and each chapter covers a different aspect (home, school, summers) in overlapping chronologies. The childhood section focuses primarily on Sofia, the capital, and the adult section covers all the regions of Bulgaria, shading into travelogue more than memoir. Woven around personal details, she covers history, current events, communism, capitalism, and ever-present tensions and truces between different ethnicities (Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians, Greeks).

Her family emigrated to New Zealand when Kassabova was 18, and the book was written in English and published in the US, with the occasional New Zealand turn of phrase.

Kassabova is a few years younger than I am. While she was growing up with her sister and parents in a 2-room (not 2 bedrooms, 2 rooms total) apartment, struggling for food and boots and sometimes electricity and water, I was growing up with relative plenty, vaguely aware but mostly oblivious of others’ struggles.

Coincidentally we also visited Bulgaria at around the same time in 2007, although I only went to Sofia and Bansko. We visited many of the same attractions in those places, and I appreciated learning more details about them. For example, I drank from the mineral spring in the center of Sofia, but didn’t know that it flooded the main street when they first accidentally dug into it.

My attention wandered occasionally while reading, but overall I recommend this book highly as a memoir and a source of information about Bulgaria then and now.

Available at bookshop.org.

“CrowHeart” by Keelin Anderson

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Subtitle: becoming unwounded, a memoir of transformation

Recommended to me by: Keelin Anderson

To tell her story of healing from incest and emotional abuse, Keelin Anderson weaves together daily narrative, fiction, quotes, tarot readings, and dreams, all in present tense.

As I read, I saw places where our paths have overlapped, and places where they have diverged. We have both struggled with finding respectful healers to help us, and have vowed to be respectful of our own clients and their individual processes.

She consciously decides to invite spirit guides into her process. I did that for a while, but found that not all spirit guides are trustworthy, and I was better off looking within for guidance. I think there are many ways of contacting Spirit and healing.

Available from Amazon.

“Fixing My Gaze” by Susan R. Barry

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Subtitle: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions

Recommended to me by: jesse-the-k (in a locked post)

This book was a revelation for me. At last, a book for which I am the perfect target audience! Susan R. Barry writes about the experience of having crossed eyes since infancy, and thus lacking stereoscopic (3-D) vision. After practicing a series of vision therapy exercises prescribed by an optometrist, she gains stereoscopic vision.

In addition to the convenience of being able to judge distances easily, she feels a part of the world she can see all around her rather than an observer of the world “out there.” She looks at the spaces between leaves with fascination. The steering wheel of her car “pops out” at her rather than appearing flat against the dashboard. Astonishing!

In addition to describing her experiences of monocular and binocular vision, she covers the neuroscience of vision, and the possible explanation for her ability to regain stereoscopic vision more than 40 years after the “critical period” of early childhood.

I also have slightly crossed eyes and lack stereoscopic vision. I believe I lost the ability around 4-5 years of age. I would love to get it back!

As both a memoir and a scientific overview, this book worked well for me. Because the author was present with her story, I felt included as well.

The only downside was the casual reference to animal experimentation. “Of course they can’t experiment on humans – so they harmed monkeys and cats instead!” (paraphrase) As much as I enjoyed the book, I almost stopped reading there.

Nevertheless, highly recommended.

fixingmygaze.com has a good resources section.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Leaving the Saints” by Martha Beck

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Subtitle: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

Recommended to me by: Reading Martha Beck’s older books

I first read this years ago and loved it. I came back to it while writing a (forthcoming) article about spiritual abuse and faith. Since I last read it, I read her newer book “Steering by Starlight” and saw that her latest book is about weight-loss, so I started re-reading with trepidation. I still like this one, though!

This book is honest about extreme sexual and spiritual abuse and its effects, side by side with humorous details about daily life. She talks about forgiveness without preaching (much). She talks about how crazymaking it is to have someone casually deny reality. She talks about how wrenching it is to lose family connections because she tells the truth.

She also talks about her personal search for faith, first as the seeking camel, then as the discerning lion, then as the innocent, playful child.

In her last act as a practicing Mormon, she spoke to a huge crowd about domestic violence. “If something I said feels right to you, believe it. If it feels wrong, disbelieve it. The choice to believe or disbelieve, that’s what makes you free.”

Available at bookshop.org.

“Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamott

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Subtitle: Some thoughts on faith

I stumbled across this book while looking for a quote about forgiveness. I usually find Anne Lamott’s books laugh-out-loud funny, reassuringly insightful, or disturbingly insightful. This book, a series of autobiographical essays about faith and religion, left me cold.

Maybe it was the large daily consumption of alcohol and other drugs she reports before she got sober. I can’t tell if she’s exaggerating or not!

Maybe it was the pretend conversion to Judaism in college, where one of the questions was “Do Jews camp?” The response was, “No, we should be at home where it’s comfortable.” She has to memorize a recipe for “Candle Salad” which includes an upright banana with a maraschino cherry on top. The vignette screeches right past funny into ugly stereotypes and cultural appropriation.

Maybe it was the later conversion to Christianity, where she describes Jesus following her everywhere like “a little cat running along at my heels.” I’m glad she found a spiritual home at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, and at the same time the description sounds a little too much like spiritual stalking to me.

Reading this book felt like having tea with a distraught, judgmental friend who is telling me every little detail of her troubles, including mean physical descriptions of the people involved, without pausing to ask how I’m doing.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso

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Recommended to me by: rushthatspeaks

This is Margaux Fragoso’s matter-of-fact memoir of growing up in Union City, New Jersey with an angry father who is a jeweler, a mentally ill mother who is often hospitalized, and a very complicated relationship with a pedophile, Peter.

I skipped whole chapters in the middle of this book, unable to read the detailed, oily dishonesty that twists a child’s desire to be pleasing and pleasant against herself, eventually manipulating her into holding still for rape.

Over the fourteen years that Margaux Fragoso was enmeshed with Peter, she continued to express her spirit and her boundaries as well. The story of her entrapment is also the story of how she survived and eventually flourished.

In the afterword, she notes, “that a sexual predator looks for children from troubled homes like mine, but that he can also trick average families into thinking he’s ordinary of even an upstanding member of the community.” If you have been the victim of such a predator’s deceit, this book is immensely validating.

Highly recommended for detailed, clear depictions of complex relationships, with a huge trigger warning for manipulation and sexual abuse.

Available at bookshop.org.