In this Book
- Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
summary
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. Table of Contents
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- Table of Contents
- pp. xi-xii
- Prologue: Larceny
- pp. xiii-2
- The Invisible and Quiet Hand
- pp. 3-13
- Tearsheets
- pp. 14-22
- The Valley of Ednah
- pp. 23-28
- The Ghost on the Staircase
- pp. 29-43
- Her Soul's History
- pp. 44-46
- The Exploding Pen
- pp. 47-52
- Walk Away from Them
- pp. 53-74
- Interior Shot
- pp. 75-83
- Translators
- pp. 84-89
- The Pattern of Her Dreams
- pp. 90-91
- The Unbridgeable Gap
- pp. 92-105
- The Nonexistent Robe
- pp. 106-129
- The Silver Sword Society
- pp. 174-182
- The Shiva Notebooks
- pp. 183-195
- A Thousand Aerial Voices
- pp. 196-199
- Family of Avatars
- pp. 200-212
- Everyday People
- pp. 214-235
- The Children's Ward
- pp. 236-256
- The Woman Who Was Absent
- pp. 258-269
- Young Americans with Helpful Attitudes
- pp. 277-294
- The Greater Joy
- pp. 295-297
- All in the Family
- pp. 298-302
- Riding the Whip
- pp. 303-306
- Danger, Pills
- pp. 307-332
- The Space between Contradictions
- pp. 308-314
- A Dark and Ageless Voice
- pp. 336-337
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 338-363
Additional Information
ISBN
9781609381806
Related ISBN(s)
9781609381790
MARC Record
OCLC
831118206
Pages
362
Launched on MUSE
2013-05-19
Language
English
Open Access
No