I first met Anne Edelstein a million years ago. She was starting out on her own as a literary agent. I was starting out on my own in New York City, and we became friends, and then life intruded and we didn't reconnect until recently! I'm thrilled to host her here (we share the same extraordinary agent, Gail Hochman). Her book, Lifesaving for Beginners is a deeply personal and profound exploration of grief, love, and how one death impacts every other death that follows. Thank you so much for being here, Anne.
“Anne Edelstein’s remarkable debut is an unforgettable―and unputdownable―portrait of a singular American family. Reminiscent of Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments and Daphne Merkin’s This Close to Happy, this slyly powerful memoir reads like a conversation with your kindest, funniest, most incisive friend. ―Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age
“Loss, grief, and ‘the proof of love’ are at stake in this poignant and penetrating memoir of a daughter’s quest to understand her elusive mother, the suicide of her beloved brother, and the mystery at the heart of the will to live.”―Jill Bialosky, author of History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished life
What was the ‘why now’ moment that jump started this memoir? What made you feel brave enough to write it?
On one level I knew immediately after my mother died
suddenly while snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef that I had to begin taking
notes in order to make sense of her death and understand my conflicted feelings
about her. But the real turning point that made me know what the core of this
book would be, and that actually got me to start writing came two years later,
when a man with MS intentionally drowned himself in the pond where I swam every
summer in Maine. That act that was the catalyst for the book.
What was the writing
like? Was it strange to be on the other
end of the agent/writer relationship?
The book, which is magnificent, feels as if you were healing yourself
through the writing. Would you say this
is the case?
The writing allowed me to revisit scenes of my life that
were difficult, but at the same time it was good to be in those scenes again, a
way of holding onto them and contemplating as I let them go.
Writing the book was very separate from my work as an
agent. I isolated myself on certain days
or partial days of the week, and over longer periods of vacation, as writing
was a very different state of mind from the everyday workings of the literary
agency. I did come to understand the notion
of, ‘I have changed through writing my book,’ something I that had always
believed happened in the process of writing a successful work and something I had
long repeated to my authors. After
completing my own memoir, I came to comprehend this in a more literal way.
At the end of the
memoir, you have a scene with you telling Eli that you will talk more about
your mother when he is older. Have you?
Both of my kids read my memoir some time ago when it was in
manuscript form, and both were very moved by it. This is not so surprising, because really
they are the heroes of the book! But
before reading the work, over the years they already had come to know most of
the details about both my mother’s and my brother’s deaths. The thing that both
of them told me struck them most when they read the manuscript was that even though
they already sort of knew most of what was in it, they hadn’t understood just how
much the family had kept quiet for so long.
The title Lifesaving
for Beginners is so evocative, and yet I found it so hopeful, too, as if there
is no time limit for saving ourselves.
Can you comment?
Lifesaving for Beginners at its most literal is a swimming
term. Even after achieving my badge as a
‘Senior Lifesaver’ I questioned whether I would ever physically be able to save
someone’s life. Today I still don’t know if it’s possible to save the life of another
person, and by that I mean spiritually more than physically. But it is possible to begin a conversation
about it. By looking into what has been
kept quiet in the past, it may be possible to shift family patterns that
haven’t been acknowledged, and with this some lives might be saved, especially
one’s own.
What’s obsessing you
now and why?
In one word, my biggest obsession is ‘time.’ And it will undoubtedly be the subject of
what I write next. By time, I don’t mean
only the passage of time, but more a sense of the meaning of ‘timelessness,’
although I think it may be understanding one that helps solve the other.
What question didn’t I
ask that I should have?
Your questions are impeccable, and allowed me to say just
what I wanted to about my memoir. Thank
you!
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