Amazon.com Review
If the Spirit Moves You chronicles the true life story of
British Vogue writer Justine Picardie's desperate effort to contact her deceased youngest sister. In a year's worth of journal entries, Picardie shares a common theme for those who are grieving a death: the intense yearning to fill the cavernous void, to hear her sister's voice. (Picardie's sister's story
Before I Say Goodbye chronicles her death from cancer.) Initially, this memoir repeats the same struggle: Picardie tries yet another cockamamie contact-dead-people machine or meets with yet another charlatan medium and comes up feeling more isolated than when she started. Things begin to shift when Picardie encounters a medium who sees Ruth on a bicycle (she rode her bike everywhere) wearing her favorite linen shirt and promising Picardie that the two sisters will speak again someday. And yet, Picardie still feels empty. Finally, a massage therapist tells Picardie, "You know, you can't bring back the dead, but you can make your children happy."
"This seems to me like the best advice I've heard for some time," Picardie writes. And from here she begins the deeper spiritual work at hand: committing to the land of the living, accepting the limitations of death, while still being willing to love and silently engage in dialogue with her sister without a shred of proof of life after death to cling to. --Gail Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
As an editor at London's Observer, Picardie hired her younger sister, Ruth, to write a series of columns chronicling her personal experiences with breast cancer. After submitting only a few essays, Ruth, the mother of two-year-old twins, died at age 33. Justine and Ruth had been exceptionally close, and here the surviving sibling offers diary entries from her own year of mourning between Good Friday 2000 and Easter Sunday 2001. Picardie is no stranger to death, undergoing an unusual number of losses through illness, accident and suicide, and this excess along with her deep grief over her sister's death leads her on a quest for answers to one of life's most basic mysteries: "Where do the dead go?" Missing Ruth terribly, Picardie realizes, "I didn't expect silence," and begins watching for signs and messages. Urgently seeking communication with "the other side," Picardie visits "spiritualists," scientific researchers and inventors of electronic machines that claim to record the voices of the dead. With obsessive hope and healthy skepticism, Picardie haunts the Internet, flies halfway around the world to a conference of psychic mediums and studies Freud and Jung's unpublished correspondences. She describes her dreams of Ruth and arguments with her rational "imaginary therapist." Frustrated with Ruth's silence, the author reveals the mourner's secret fear that "she doesn't love me anymore; she doesn't want to talk to me." Originally published by Macmillan in Great Britain, this well-told tale is a deeply touching, intellectually captivating investigation into the elusive nature of love and death.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
