Molly's Reads
DISABILITY/LOSS OF A CHILD
ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS
- Born Twice by Giuseppe Pontiggia. Read an excerpt.
- Holding Silvan: A Brief Life by Monica Wesolowska. Read an excerpt.
- The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp Black. Read an excerpt.
- Sanctuary: A Memoir by Emily Rapp Black. Read an excerpt.
- Ask Me His Name: A Mother’s Story of Hope: Learning to Live and Laugh Again After the Loss of My Baby by Elle Wright. Read an excerpt.
- A Bump in the Road: A Story of Fertility, Hope and Trying Again by Elle Wright. Read an excerpt.
Published by Knopf, 2002
Amazon Link“Definitely!” I say, with the prodigal enthusiasm that we have when it doesn’t cost anything. It’s what differentiates visitors to an artist’s studio from buyers.
Published by Hawthorne Books, 2013
Amazon LinkUntil now, I’ve written in my diary with ambivalence. I’ve been suspicious of my penchant for thinking in terms of narrative. But now I realize what my mind is doing. If I understand my past by way of stories, I may also understand my future that way. I’m trying to find the story of Silvan that I’ll someday tell myself. I want it to be a story I can bear to hear, a story of loving him well.
Published by Penguin Press, 2013
Amazon LinkThis was the path I would walk. I didn’t have to “like” it or ever “manage” it, but I did have to accept it. As the other dragon moms reminded me in the weeks after Ronan’s diagnosis, I had no other choice. This is part of being an adult, I thought, part of being a parent. I thought about something Roshi Joan had said the day before: “You feed and wash the baby, even if you know it will die in the morning.”
Published by Random House, 2021
Amazon LinkEveryone did everything I asked during those final days, but nobody could give me what I wanted, what I needed, what I had to have but could not have and would never have again: my son returned to me, his brain repaired, time unwound. I wanted nothing less than a new world and my son allowed to live within it.
Published by Lagom, 2019
Amazon LinkI remember saying to Nico, ‘I just need to sit on the beach, stare at the sea and make some sense of this.’ Of course, there was no sense to be made.
Published by Lagom, 2021
Amazon LinkEveryone, of course, loves a happy ending, but to me this seemed so far away from that just yet. There’s never a happy ending after you lose a child; the arrival of another, or even ten more children, does not simply erase the one that came before. I didn’t like that turn of phrase. I could see happiness, a different kind of happiness, on the horizon, within touching distance. But it wouldn’t be an ending, just the beginning of a new chapter.
ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – GRAPHIC
- Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir by Tom Hart. Read an excerpt.
Published by St. Martin's Press, 2016
Amazon LinkA friend writes “Rosalie opened a capacious hole in our hearts” “Capacious” as in “capacity to love.” My heart is a desperate capacious hole.
NOVELS
- The Condition: A Novel by Jennifer Haigh. Read an excerpt.
- Falling Out of Time by David Grossman. Read an excerpt.
- After the End: A Novel by Clare Mackintosh. Read an excerpt.
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
Amazon LinkThe rest of the fight was too painful to remember, though its denouement-him sleeping on the wet grass after she’d locked him out of the house-would stay with him forever. They were twenty years old, new to love’s expansions and contractions, its fissures and failures. How it could leave you broke and busted on the neighbor’s lawn, weeping and seeing stars.
Published by Vintage, 2014
Amazon LinkWOMAN: Will I ever again / see you / as you are, / rather than as / he is not?
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019
Amazon LinkBoth of us longed for siblings growing up, and yearned for them even more as adults, with ageing parents and grown-up worries too intimate for friends. Then Dylan fell ill, and now … now it feels wrong. It isn’t like buying a car to replace the one scrapped. Empty arms feel empty forever, even when they’re full again.