The Magical Language Of Others A Memoir

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir Named One of the Best Books by Asian American Writers by Oprah Daily Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice.

A Lesser Love is a book of love poems and elegies for those who have fumbled and stumbled and disappointed. These are poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, even countries and communities. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh has descibred her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. This spirit of jeong permeates this book of poems that are astonishing in the connections they draw and the ties they bind. In A Lesser Love readers will find poems composed of “Ingredients for Memories that Can Be Used as Explosives” and poems composed of chemistry equations that convert light into “reasonable dioxide” and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. A book of intimate poems that invite readers into a private world, that geography grows wider and more interconnected with each passing page. Through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers, we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, they hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. With evocative lyricism and profound emotional intensity Koh has crafted a book of poems that charm and delight and profoundly enrich.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

'I FELT RECOGNISED ON EVERY PAGE, LEARNT SO MANY NEW THINGS, AND LAUGHED SO HARD I CHOKED ON MY WATER. READ THIS!!!' NAOISE DOLAN, AUTHOR OF EXCITING TIMES 'CANDID, WITTY ... A BRAVE BOOK THAT PUTS VULNERABILITY FULLY ON SHOW' INDEPENDENT Obsessive was, still is, my natural state, and I never wondered why. I didn't mind, didn't know that other people could feel at peace. I always felt like a raw nerve, but then, I thought that everyone did. Writer and journalist Marianne Eloise was born obsessive. What that means changes day to day, depending on what her brain latches onto: fixations with certain topics, intrusive violent thoughts, looping phrases. Some obsessions have lasted a lifetime, while others will be intense but only last a week or two. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is a culmination of a life spend obsessing, offering a glimpse into Marianne's brain, but also an insight into the lives of others like her. From death to Medusa, to Disneyland to fire, to LA to her dog, the essays explore the intersection of neurodivergence, fixation and disorder, telling the story of one life underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession.

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey? Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.

A transcendent memoir by poet Maria Mutch about the distances that can form between people who should be the closest of all—husband and wife, parent and child, lifelong friends and partners. Unfolding over the witching hours between midnight and 6am, this moving and meditative book takes place during the two year period in which the author's son Gabriel, who is autistic and also has Down Syndrome, did not sleep through the night. Gabriel spends much of his life as a puzzling enigma to his parents, but when he becomes unlocked by jazz music, his mother finds herself taking him into jazz clubs at all hours of the night, where he becomes a favorite patron. There is a fierce beauty in the isolation that envelops these two people as they wait out the nighttime hours, which Mutch compares to the isolation of polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd. His story, interwoven here, brings insight into the profound experience of physical isolation, and creates a shared language for the experience of feeling alone. Through these three main characters—mother, son, adventuring explorer—Mutch triangulates overlapping and layered themes of solitude that enlighten and uplift one another.

Judy Batalion grew up in a house filled with endless piles of junk, obsessively gathered and stored by her hoarder mother. The first chance she had, she escaped the clutter to create a new identity - one made of order, regimen and clean white walls. Until, one day, she found herself enmeshed in life's biggest chaos: motherhood. Told with heartbreaking honesty and humour, this is Judy's poignant account of her trials negotiating the messiness of motherhood and the indelible marks that mothers and daughters make on each other's lives.

From the outside, Vanya’s childhood looked idyllic... WINNER, 2019 Next Generation Indie Books (Memoir: Overcoming Adversity) She rode horses with her father in the solitude of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attended flamboyant operas with her mother in the city. But life for Vanya and her family turned dark when ghosts from her father’s service on a Pacific destroyer in World War II tore her family apart. Set in postwar California, this is the story of a girl who tried to make sense of her parents’ unpredictable actions—from being left to lie in her own blood-soaked diaper while her Christian Scientist mother prayed, to refusing to get medical help while watching her father writhe on his bed in the detox ward, his hands and feet tethered with leather straps—by immersing herself in the beauty and solitude of the wilderness around her. It was only decades later when memories began to haunt her, that Vanya was able to look back with unflinching honesty and tender compassion for her family and herself. Boot Language shines a light in the darkness so that others can find their way This spellbinding memoir offers encouragement and hope to those who are: in a dysfunctional family, experiencing or navigating emotional abuse, in a relationship with an abused partner or child, or simply looking to find happiness in spite of their past. Erickson’s story shines a light in the darkness so that others can find their way to heal the past. In this elegant, haunting narrative, she invites us to witness it all—from the gripping, often disturbing, truths of her childhood to her ultimate survival. Boot Language uplifts the reader with the knowledge that it is your responses to life’s adverse circumstances that make all the difference; and that by facing your past you can find the inner strength to permanently discover that you can transform your life. While Erickson’s memories would never completely disappear, they no longer held her in their grip. They have importance. They became an integral part of her life, leading her to become a successful teacher, author, and speaker, helping countless women and teens come to terms with their past. Order your copy today and begin reading this disturbing, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring memoir.