Customer Reviews

The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Wishing Year," by Noelle Oxenhandler, is the kind of book that I am always wishing for--absorbing and lovely to read, and at the same time provocative and intellectually engaging. Along the lines of literary non-fiction like Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone" and Rebecca Solnit's "A Fieldguide to Getting Lost," this memoir stages the existential predicament of how to approach one's own longings and ambitions, with grace and authenticity, while also acknowledging the pressures and realities of our consumer-based society. The comedic pace of the narrative is note-on, populated with wide-ranging geographical adventures, winsome characters, and deeply funny everyday moments. Waking up one January morning, Oxenhandler confronts several absences in her life and decides to embark upon a yearlong quest for very specific objects. Halfway through the book, she refers to her quest as an "experiment in desire," and this phrase seems to embody the underlying ambition of the book itself--to enter into the terrifying quandaries that genuine passion brings with it, while at the same time relishing the wonderful angst, even dread, of wishing. Oxenhandler's experiment gives rise to profound and timeless questions: what do our desires reveal about ourselves? Is it possible to seek spiritual wholeness, or romance, or even financial prosperity, and still retain skepticism towards superficial success, pop psychology, and ego-based desires? Like books by Franzen and Solnit, Oxenhandler's memoir demonstrates what, in my experience, the best kinds of texts ask of their reader--to share in the spiritually intense comedy of human life and to take real risks in the questions that we pose and the desires that we wish for.

I really liked this book and it's not the type of book I usually read. There are too many books,tapes,programs,dvd's,etc. you name it-- we are in a storm of "law of attraction" information these days. But there has never been anyone who is not connected in some way to these products that has written about their personal experience while using this information. Very savvy of Ms.Oxenhandler to write a memoir about this topic as well as timely. Magic is a delicious subject and law of attraction is the topic on everyone's list. Ms. Oxenhandler is very knowledgeable about things that I did not expect to be in this book which is what made it an interesting read. Her experiment in making wishes to better her life was fun to read but it is just one layer of this book. The one thing that did disappoint was that she did not give the readers any information about her ailing mother after she spent a great deal of time worrying about and helping to move her from France to CA. All in all it's a good read. You can read this book over a weekend.

I spent the whole day yesterday reading this wonderful book. It is the kind of book I've been waiting for for quite some time. It's a book for people who have read all the Law of Attraction, intention manifestation, or even magic books. If you've manifested a few things here and there, but still have some concerns about how it all works or how you can be both spiritual and materialistic, this book is a great start.

It's great to finally read a book that goes deeper into the act of wishing (as the author calls it) and provides its readers with an in-depth real life example of what happens when you take that first step. It's amazing what starts to happen when you take that first step: the Universe responds. I have had experiences like the author and I felt her excitement when things started to happen, seemingly out of nowhere.

That being said, I had a few minor issues with this book. The author herself complains a lot about how her spiritual community fell apart. That's fine and all, but I think it's perfectly clear that she was one of the reasons that happened. She had an affair with a married man (the spiritual mentor of her community) while being married herself. She glosses over this in a couple of sentences in the book. I feel that if she really wanted to grow as a spiritual individual, she would acknowledge that she played a huge part in why her spiritual community fell apart. She should face her own darkness and take some responsibility, instead of always complaining: "Oh, my spiritual community fell apart, and now I don't know who I am." I don't know, maybe she has dealt with those issues. Maybe she is reluctant to share it with the world, and that's understandable.

With that being said, that was a very minor detail I had trouble with. I actually enjoyed 99% of this book, hence the five star rating. It was fun to read her reactions to books that I've read myself, like "It Works" and "The Science of Getting Rich" or that ever-popular movie, "The Secret." (I had a similar reaction to hers.)

Overall, this is a very worthwhile book for anyone who is interested in intention manifestation, The Secret, magic, or whatever. I can't recommend it highly enough.

If you feel like all the books you've been reading sound too good to be true or extremely filtered of real human experience (a whole book of "you can do it, think positive!" gets kind of annoying when you have real life problems to deal with), then I definitely recommend picking up this very interesting memoir.

-Ater

There's a lot going for this book, and a lot gone wrong. One gets the sense here of an author interested in wishing and desire, an academic whose editor said, "Noelle, nobody will read it like this. Rewrite it as ~Eat, Pray, Love~!" since memoir sells a lot better than academic treatises these days. This book invites comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, but they are vastly different in tone, revelation, and outcome.

The first part of the book is contrived, as if the author constructed a selective past to support the thesis, working toward a breakthrough revelation and transformation at the end: see, I couldn't wish, I couldn't accept happiness, my gold coins turned to mud under my pillow, but now I have what I asked for!

And yet, for a reader like myself (the target audience, I assume), it's excruciating to follow such a sad trajectory. This could be me. In slightly different circumstances, this has been me, living on "liquids and canned peaches" for months after a slaughtering heartbreak.

The author enjoys research and facts and the academic life, and those are her strong suits. She shines when she's making historical and literary connections, working her fast-moving mind and researching answers. The thick-skinned self-revelation necessary for convincing memoir, however, is notably lacking.

~Eat, Pray, Love~was breezy, self-deprecating, and funny, while this book takes itself quite seriously and, worse, is uncomfortable with significant personal revelation. I hope this book doesn't hurt the author more than it helps. She starts and ends with sensitive vulnerability and often meets her helpers when she is crying or otherwise in public emotional distress.

Some of the most interesting questions raised are left frustratingly unanswered. In a Book of Days format, each chapter a month in the wishing year, the author describes the trajectory of her experiment, from doubt to testing to fulfillment. But those questions become the elephant in the living room. What was the story of the now-defunct spiritual community? She describes the unraveling of her spiritual group in half a dozen deliberately vague and short sentences. Similarly, in a prefatory note, she explains that she overexposed her daughter in a previous book and has agreed to mention her only in passing in this one; again, an important character noticeably missing.

As a reluctant memoirist, she does not reveal the most essential things. Here's a mother who won't write about her daughter, a professor who doesn't write about her work, a spiritual seeker wounded by an undescribed cult - this certainly isn't Elizabeth Gilbert's year off.

I don't blame her, but perhaps memoir is not her best medium. Elizabeth Gilbert made the reader believe that she wasn't withholding anything essential, that the details of her messy divorce were just boring mind chatter, but in The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire, the intensity behind those secrets sinks the authenticity of the rest of the book, especially since one of the three wishes - the most noble, the most devastating, the wish for spiritual healing - goes unanswered, and the lack of answer glossed over, or perhaps not noticed. (Sitting in an empty temple for an afternoon doth not constitute spiritual healing, and the book itself confirms that.)

In this wonderful book, The Wishing Year, Noelle Oxenhandler leads readers on an engaging and enlightening journey through her yearlong experiment with wishing. Oxenhandler is not one to easily embrace New Age ideas or magical thinking, and wishing does not come naturally to her. In order to begin making shrines and sending messages to the universe about what she most wants in her life, Oxenhandler must confront what she calls her "skeptical bent and...tilt toward a certain pessimistic melancholy," along with a Jewish-Catholic upbringing and many years as a practicing Buddhist. But as she begins her first tentative steps toward manifesting three deep desires -- to buy a house of her own, to find a man to love, and to gain spiritual healing -- and the universe starts sending pieces of those desires her way, she is hooked.

Oxenhandler is remarkably well read, and she gracefully weaves myth, religion, anthropology, and psychology into the story of her own experiences. Equally at home with Zen Buddhist principles, the philosophy of magic, and the archetypal meaning of Aunt Jemima, Oxenhandler draws readers along on an inner and outer voyage whose landscape includes her own resistance and bouts of despair, the hot springs of Northern California, and healing encounters in Hawaii, Mexico and France.

I found Oxenhandler's writing beautifully lyrical, filled with passages of luminous intelligence and moments of impish humor. Her story made me think about my own travels away from skepticism, which began 22 years ago when I left the East Coast -- where I'd spent many years studying philosophy in Ivy League universities -- to settle in Northern California, where the world seemed so much wider and filled with so many more possibilities than I'd previously imagined. After finishing Oxenhandler's book, though, I can tell I haven't ranged far enough. I think I may need to go out and buy some joint compound and balsa wood, to start building a few shrines of my own!

One caveat: I suspect that some readers may wish for a deeper level of personal revelation, may want to know the gory details behind crises that Oxenhandler refers to almost in passing -- the ending of her marriage or the collapse of her spiritual community that bring the author to the book's jumping off point. On my reading, the book is not about what brought her there, but about the journey she makes from that point on. The story begins when Oxenhandler becomes ready to suspend disbelief and give herself over to the project of wishing for her heart's desire. And that is where the gifts of this lovely book lie -- in the story of how your life can change, once you let yourself believe that just maybe, wishing can make it so.

Having tried to read Eat, Pray, Love and found it so sadly lightweight, I couldn't finish, I was hesitant about picking up The Wishing Year. But, Oxenhandler's book surpassed all expectations. Readable, intelligent, thought provoking, authentic, without going into useless or irrelevant details. It's a wonderful book for starting a conversation about self-limiting beliefs, core religious values (no matter what your religion is), and coming back after a huge disaster -- that you yourself caused and feel the devastating weight of still. This is the book you want to give ALL your book-loving friends this holiday season.

Noelle Oxenhandler embarks tentatively on a year of seeking her dreams. This becomes her Wishing Year as she moves towards half-visualized goals for a lover, a house, a tropical escape and her own spirituality. She alternately relates her own experiences during this year and sprinkles in research on wishes and dreams. Her literature search on the topic gets a little tedious, while her personal experiences are a bit fragmented.
Despite that, I could relate to her search for more in life. More meaning. More closeness. More stability. Many women enter that seeking mode in their forties, fifties, or sixties.
Oxenhandler comes to realize that she keeps herself from achieving goals through fear that good fortune comes with an expected payback down the road. I enjoyed her descriptions and feelings that carried the book for me.

Noelle Oxenhandler's work -- in the New Yorker or Tricycle or book form -- always knocks me out. Her writing is sometimes referred to as memoir, but I think she's a philosopher who uses elements of her own life, along with her research, to explore the textures and workings of the world. Her books have such a remarkable combination of pleasures: gorgeous, lucid, vivid prose; wonderful descriptions of people and places; philosophical inquiry; a rich, interdisciplinary investigation of her topics; brave but elegant personal revelation; and a feeling for the rich textures and absurdities of life. I loved The Eros of Parenthood (The Eros Of Parenthood: Explorations In Light And Dark), in which she goes into territory that most writers would be afraid to touch and handles it with such grace that she conceals the difficulty of her accomplishments as a writer and a reader.

The Wishing Year is another example of her generosity and originality. The book is funny in a subtle and complicated way, and at the same time, moving. She doesn't shy away from either library or field research (I'm including swimming with the dolphins in Hawaii, or following unlikely wishing practices, as well as delving into history, mythology, philosophy, and even self-help books).

The Wishing Year invites us to examine our own depth-monsters -- anyone who reads it is likely to have to own up to their own desires and their own choices. It's a delicious book to read but not always a comfortable one. Her writing is so beautiful that I think some people may be surprised by how challenging it is. I think it's a book one is likely to love when coming to it with an open sense of inquiry, and maybe it's a book that would enrage those readers who would rather not look into their own areas of darkness and desire.

The book is gripping -- it reads like a novel -- it's more about stirring up the questions for readers than trying to answer them in ways that would invariably be false or reductive. What are the lines between sacred and profane? Where do traditional magic and modern science intersect? What do we allow ourselves to wish for, and how, and why? Are there wishes we should not have? How do we work with the images and desires presented to us by our unconscious minds, even those we find somehow embarrassing or scary? How do we come to terms with our lives, past and present?

We live vicariously through reading all kinds of books, but memoir truly gives readers the sense that they understand the writer's inner experience of life. Every once in a while a memoir appears that makes you fall in love with the author's mind. That's how I feel about Noelle Oxenhandler's The Wishing Year. At so many points in the book I found myself appreciating not just her humor and her intelligence but her entire way of being in the world. For example, when I read the account of how the author sat with her dying friend, I felt I was witnessing something essential about simply being with a dying person, about meeting those who are dying on their own terms and not ours. The other people in the memoir are presented with complexity, not as a cast of flat characters. The Wishing Year is a memoir that, among other things, shows us a person who knows how to live life with compassion, openness and grace. It's good to soak up the details of such a life.

The first time I read this book I was caught up in Noelle's personal story and read it rather hurriedly, rushing to the end, wondering whether or not Noelle's wishes would come true. About half way through I made the decision to reread it again so that I could more fully take in and integrate the scholarly information about wishing. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in wishes, prayers, intentions, the power of thought, the limits of all these, and more. I'm about the same age as the author and in the midst of a hugely transformational period (work, relocation, relationship ending). I have also recently decided to leave a New Thought spiritual community and have struggled to put into words my reasons for doing so. During my 2nd reading, I have kept a journal at my side to jot down resonating ideas and questions. I truly appreciate the gift of this book coming into my life at this time.