Customer Reviews

Vertigo: 8A Memoir

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Louise DeSalvo's memoir captivates the reader. It offers an honest portrayal of depression's effects on her life, as well as the lives of her more clinically depressed mother and sister.

DeSalvo transforms the pain of her life into art. This is an inspirational story that will allow you a deeper look into the effect depression has had on this brilliant Virginia Woolf scholar.

I have read a great many books on writing, and written a few myself. But Writing as a Way of Healing has gone straight to the top of my list of favorites, and I suspect that it will stay there for a very long time--perhaps for all time. But in the process of reading this book, I discovered I had to read the book that went before it, and now I want to tell you about both.

Louise DeSalvo has been teaching English and creative writing for nearly twenty years. The first in her working-class Italian family to graduate from college, she escaped a soul-deadening home life--a depressed mother, an angry father--by reading, going to the movies, and dating, dating, dating. It wasn't until the late 1980's, when she wrote a scholarly book about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the life and work of Virginia Woolf that she began to come to terms with her own childhood traumas and the lingering shadows of her mother's death and her sister's suicide. She dealt with her pain, anxiety, and depression in a memoir called Vertigo (now available in paperback, published by Plume), in which she explored her own story. Vertigo isn't a pleasant book, or easy--it's about hidden pain and the depression and despair into which a woman can fall when she attempts to avoid self-knowledge. But it is a necessary book, for through it, DeSalvo learns that the process of life-writing is also the process of healing. What she discovered in Vertigo, and what she subsequently put to use in her own teaching, is the subject and object of Writing As a Way of Healing.

DeSalvo's section and chapter titles, by themselves, are helpful clues to the book's significance. The first section is called "Writing as a Way of Healing," and contains four chapters: Why Write, How Writing Can Help Us Heal, Writing as a Therapeutic Process, and Writing Pain, Writing Loss. Section Two is called "The Process/The Program," and has four chapters: The Healing Power of the Writing Process, Caring for Ourselves as We Write; and Stages of Growth I and II. The third section, "From Woundedness to Wholeness Through Writing" contains two chapters: Writing the Wounded Psyche and Writing the Wounded Body. The Epilogue is called "From Silence to Testimony." Each of the chapters contains suggestions for writing, examples (from such writers as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Isabel Allende, Djuna Barnes), discussion, and ideas--lots of ideas, so many ideas that you'll find yourself wanting to stop reading and start writing (something that DeSalvo herself, no doubt, would applaud).

DeSalvo refers extensively to a favorite researcher of mine--Dr. James Pennebaker--whose book Opening Up has been an important influence on my own understanding of the healing power of the writing process. When we use writing to explore traumatic or anxiety-provoking events in detail, together with the feelings that arise from those events, the writing process can help us to understand more clearly, cope in a more balanced way, and even feel better physically. Seen from this point of view, life-writing becomes a lifetime project, as we unravel the meanings of events and explore our responses to them. When we commit ourselves to this very important lifelong project--recognizing that we don't write our story once and for all and forget it!--we commit ourselves to a lifetime of learning, growing and healing.

by Susan Wittig Albert

for Story Circle Book Reviews

www.storycirclebookreviewsorg

reviewing books by, for, and about women

I had to read this for a memoir course for my English degree. The writing is immaculate, and an immense help for emerging writers.

I got into this novel right away and couldn't put it down. I loved how the story kept jumping back and forth but that it all came together so well. Totally inspirational read in so many ways.

I found this memoir in one of my favorite bookstores and thought it would be good. The copy I found was very creased in the spine and the jacket looked worn as well. Inside I found pink highlighting, blue ink underlining and some handwritten notes in the margins. I thought the cover looked interesting..covers can (sometimes) tell you a lot about the book..and in this case that is very true. The author, Louise, captured my interest in the author Virginia Wolff--so that author goes on my list of authors and books to read. As memoirs are so good at doing I have gotten another whole set of books to read from reading just this one memoir. Memoirs have a way of doing that. :)