Just a Dropped Stitch (Emerald City Books)

Just a Dropped Stitch is a memoir told in interlocking short stories. Its a family photo album; each snapshot tells a mini-story. Youre sure you understand what youre seeing but its not until youve finished flipping through the entire album that you develop an intimate sense of who this family is. You thought you knew them understood all the subtleties and dynamics but change the angle soften the focus flip the page; theres a different story. Jesse the narrator is on a search. Shes trying to identify the dropped stitches in her own life to name them and reknit them into a whole. As the book opens Jesses mother is dying but Jesse and her father find it impossible to face the inevitable. Turn the page: Jesse desperately wants to have children; shes a lesbian; she has to figure out how to make that happen. Later we meet her children Noah and Sophie; were introduced to Anna who becomes Jesses spouse before the world has caught up with the concept. We meet grandparents and learn that in Jesses family writing is revered but infused with unspoken taboos. And we meet her brothers who each has a particular place to stand in the family portrait. Jesse has a story to tell and she isnt sure its safe to tell it. Loss and grief being silenced and silencing oneself becoming frozen and the heat-generating melting power of love these are the themes in Just a Dropped Stitch. The importance of naming the redemption that comes from breaking silences these are the interwoven threads. Meanwhile keep flipping through the album and you see snapshots of everyday life: hiking with Noah shopping with Sophie for a bat mitzvah dress. And Jesses mother who refuses to completely disappear makes a surprise appearance embarrassing Jesse at a job interview. As we close the album were keeping vigil with Jesse in the hospital while she waits to hear whether she has the disease that killed her mother. And then theres a final snapshot: a handmade Chinese box with sides that drop open revealing a blood-red interior where theres nothing to hide. How do you tell a life story with all the myriad stories the secrets the multiple selves that go into it? Laurie Levinger has written her way to an answer beautiful and true fierce and tender redemptive and heart-rending. In the process shes found a form and a voice that can carry the full range of a womans--daughters mothers sisters lovers--experience. Listen. --Ellen Lesser author of The Shoplifters Apprentice The Other Woman and The Blue Streak Once I began reading I could not stop. It is a beautifully written memoir and more: a provocative revelation about love family the death of a generation impacted by holocaust and the politics of fear and acceptance. It needs to be read! --Laura Simms storyteller and author of The Robe of Love Laurie Levinger takes us from one stage of adulthood with all its suffering and joys to another so seamlessly that we are only gradually aware of the giant steps she has taken to claim her voice. There is a camaraderie of spirit in these stories that weaves the reader in. She bravely raises difficult issues looks at them squarely with intelligence and compassion. --Charlotte Houde Quimby New Hampshire State Representative Laurie Levinger is a retired psychotherapist who lives and writes in Vermont. She is the author of What War? Testimonies of Maya Survivors.