Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness by Robin Hemley

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By Robin Hemley

The facts to hand: an autobiography-- whole with their mother's edits-- written through his excellent and disturbingly spiritual sister; a narrative that includes real youth occasions, yet released as fiction; perjured court docket files hidden in a drawer for many years. those are the clues Robin Hemley gathers whilst he units out to reconstruct the lifetime of his sister Nola, who died on the age of twenty-five after numerous years of remedy for schizophrenia. yet Hemley, hampered by means of a "larcenous middle" that covets his sister's tale for himself, discovers that discovering the reality in any life-- even one's own-- is a fragmented and complicated task.

Nola: A Memoir of religion, artwork, and Madness is far greater than a remembrance of a tender lady who used to be fed on her whole existence via a keenness for God. it's also a glance at what humans decide to demonstrate and hide, and an exam of the large toll psychological disease takes on a relations. eventually, it's a revelation of the alchemy that creates a author: self assurance within the unknowable, mistrust of the confirmed, tortuous devotion to the fantastic print in existence, and the sacrifice to writing itself because it performs the jobs of confessor, scourge, and creator.

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Extra info for Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Example text

I wanted to keep walking. There were so many stars she hadn't yet told me about. I didn't know all their names. 32 Nola Kennedy was assassinated that fall, and Nola wanted immediately to get in touch with his spirit-she always aimed high. The night she decided to try to contact Kennedy was only a couple of days after his death. My mother and father had gone off to a faculty party and left me and Jonathan in Nola's care. Not long after our parents left the house, Nola took out her Ouija board and asked us if we wanted to help her try to get in touch with Kennedy.

Al'al-, seen. iel:. s'tietts. My stepfather caught me one afternoon in a kneeling position on the nttl'sel')· floor. with my arms wildly outspread. crying out "Oh God. I love you and I wish I could shake hands with you. " He always made a joke of my piety: he was a Greenwich village intellectual and a cum laude graduate of Amherst. a kind of twentieth-century Faust. seHeal fttina. ana r efttsea te Elttestien tne Hfftits el nis intel leet. it .. seeattse Most of his poetry and prose were profoundly religious.

ESpftir el'l: efter. a. into a vast nothingness ~Again, I was certain that I was going to die, and prepared for a loss of consciousness. Suddenly, without any warning or intimation that this was going to happen, we found ourselves descending at a steadily decreasing rate, and when, miraculously, we were nearly at the bottom of this interminable drop, we were floating as gently as feathers spertin~ in the wind. When we had nearly reached the bottom we were submerged in a wide, dark lake wnese prefetll'l:a.

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