Rebecca McClanahan - Böcker

Are we responsible for, and to, those forces that have formed us—our families, friends, and communities? Where do we leave off and others begin? In The Tribal Knot, Rebecca McClanahan looks for answers in the history of her family. Poring over letters, artifacts, and documents that span more than a century, she discovers a tribe of hardscrabble Midwest farmers, hunters, trappers, and laborers struggling to hold tight to the ties that bind them, through poverty, war, political upheavals, illness and accident, filicide and suicide, economic depressions, personal crises, and global disasters. Like the practitioners of Victorian "hair art" who wove strands of family members' hair into a single design, McClanahan braids her ancestors' stories into a single intimate narrative of her search to understand herself and her place in the family's complex past.

In this ensemble of beautifully personal, interrelated essays, writer and poet Rebecca McClanahan weaves together threads of stories and common experiences to create a meditation on family life. She explores the familiar rituals, the shared dreams, and the guarded secrets that tie family together as she unravels the mysteries behind familial relationships. Throughout, McClanahan seeks to identify what it means to be an individual within the context of kinship and unexpected connections.Besides navigating her own emotional landscape and her family's, McClanahan revisits the physical places of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She takes us to the military bases where her father and husband were stationed, to the cemeteries she loved as both child and adult, and to the various hospitals and homes that served as backdrops for family crises and celebrations. Without sentimentality, she considers the meaning of losses—the loss of a child, a family home, and a family pet, and a lost chance at motherhood.Partly fashioned around the lines of the folk tune "The Riddle Song," The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings captures the palpable bonds that exist between mothers, daughters, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and grandparents. Through intuitive and exquisite language, Rebecca McClanahan reveals the strange and enchanting patterns that connect her to these ancestral souls.

My father’s heart, and my mother’s, can still break. In this most essential way, they are still themselves. They are still here. To stay together until the end was the deepest wish of Rebecca McClanahan’s elderly, frail parents. So when the two of them could no longer care for themselves, Rebecca and her siblings moved them from Indiana to North Carolina, where she and her husband assumed the roles of “first responders” with support from the extended family. Over the course of her parents' final years, Rebecca discovers that the landscape of dementia isn’t entirely bleak if we can hold on long enough to rediscover in our loved ones the essential selves we feared were lost. Light Falls on Everything takes us inside the intimate rooms of long-term caregiving, where exhaustion, confusion, heartbreak, and grief can shadow the most ordinary days. Still, light flickers in even the darkest corners, revealing moments of tenderness, laughter, absurdity, surprise, and unrelenting love. Emotionally gripping and unstintingly honest, this memoir invites us to reflect on the timeless nature of love and loss and, with it, the unexpected lessons of caregiving: how to move forward into our own uncertain futures, accept grief as a longtime companion, and approach death with some measure of grace.

My father’s heart, and my mother’s, can still break. In this most essential way, they are still themselves. They are still here. To stay together until the end was the deepest wish of Rebecca McClanahan’s elderly, frail parents. So when the two of them could no longer care for themselves, Rebecca and her siblings moved them from Indiana to North Carolina, where she and her husband assumed the roles of “first responders” with support from the extended family. Over the course of her parents' final years, Rebecca discovers that the landscape of dementia isn’t entirely bleak if we can hold on long enough to rediscover in our loved ones the essential selves we feared were lost. Light Falls on Everything takes us inside the intimate rooms of long-term caregiving, where exhaustion, confusion, heartbreak, and grief can shadow the most ordinary days. Still, light flickers in even the darkest corners, revealing moments of tenderness, laughter, absurdity, surprise, and unrelenting love. Emotionally gripping and unstintingly honest, this memoir invites us to reflect on the timeless nature of love and loss and, with it, the unexpected lessons of caregiving: how to move forward into our own uncertain futures, accept grief as a longtime companion, and approach death with some measure of grace.

In this lively and deeply affecting memoir, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York as only a stunned newcomer can: in overheard conversations on park benches, songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. Having uprooted their settled lives in North Carolina to pursue a long-held dream of living in Manhattan, she and her husband struggle to find jobs, forge friendships, and create a home in a city of strangers. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery complicate their story, merging the public with the private, the present with the past, to shape a journey richer than either could have imagined.