Product Description

This widely acclaimed memoir is a vivid account of a young Italian American girl's struggle to transcend the limits imposed on her life and documents the making of a working-class writer and scholar. It has been declared "a brave, heart-wrenchingly honest and utterly un-put-down-able memoir. Young Louise DeSalvo leaps from the pages in all her brightness and brashness." --Robert Cormier author of The Chocolate Wars

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #901399 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
DeSalvo (Conceived with Malice) frankly, and wisely, states that her memories of how she grew from a working-class, Italian American child in Hoboken to become a Virginia Woolf scholar may not be accurate because memory cannot always be trusted. This account, with its emphasis on her early years, is the way it seems to her to have been. Her happiest time, she claims, was during WWII, when the world as she saw it was composed only of women and children (she was only three at the war's end). Then the men returned and life became grim. Later her mother became depressed and was institutionalized, her sister committed suicide, she herself was sexually abused by a female family member. Books and the public library were her refuge. In hindsight she finds parallels between her life and Virginia Woolf's that might escape a casual reader. She also sees them in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which she saw 11 times in one week when she was 15. A more exuberant period came in suburban Ridgefield, N.J., during what she calls her boy crazy period: "I have, in quick succession, 'dated' the entire starting line up of my high school's basketball team... many of its football players, all the baseball infielders, and a few wrestlers." DeSalvo clearly has a sense of humor, and although her success in life?she repeatedly stresses the problems of being Italian, working class and a "girl"?may not be as unique as she seems to think, her clarity of insight and expression makes this an impressive achievement.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Growing up Italian American in the 1950s and observing the women around her, DeSalvo became keenly aware of the severely limited opportunities available to women generally. Determined not to live a life like her mother's, filled with frustration, depression, and fear, she turned to literature and education for solace and direction. This memoir traces DeSalvo's struggle to become a woman independent in her own right and eventually a professor at Hunter College and author of the biographical study Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work (LJ 2/1/90), among other books. DiSalvo conveys her experiences with wit, style, and creativity yet permits the pathos of her life to surface occasionally, for example when she describes her attempts to deal with her mother's death and her sister's suicide. Writing and research provide the focus and stability in her life, relieving an ever-hovering tendency toward depression and illness. Her story will inspire all women faced with making choices in today's dizzying atmosphere.?Nancy Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A biographer and literary critic's memoir of growing up in Hoboken, N.J., in a claustrophobic Italian-American family. DeSalvo (English/Hunter College; Conceived with Malice, 1994, etc.) was the first member of her working-class family to graduate from college. She escaped a stultifying home life--depressed and agoraphobic mother, belligerent and rigid father--through books, movies, study, and boys, boys, boys. She became a Virginia Woolf scholar, writing in her controversial 1989 study about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on Woolf's work. The effort to come to grips with the lingering mental strain caused by her mother's death, her sister's suicide, her memory of childhood traumas of her own--plus the intense, consuming life of an academic writer- -eventually compelled her to write about her own life in an effort to ``to give it some shape, some order.'' The result is an extremely readable book--if not necessarily a lovable one. DeSalvo's prose is plain; her tone often cool. We gain insight into her life and her mother's life--but not her dead sister's. New Jersey of the 1950s is vividly evoked, but DeSalvo's present situation as teacher, wife, and mother is less vivid. Among the book's best elements: a list of her mother's punitive and pathetic attempts at cooking--from liver, heart, and snails to head cheese, eels, and octupus. Vertigo's main failing is a lack of continuity; there is a grab-bag feeling to some of the reminiscences, and sometimes topics are misleadingly highlighted--a chapter called ``Anorexia,'' for example, is not about the anorexia of the author or anyone close to her, but rather about anorexia in general, and the effect is that of DeSalvo's trying to touch all possible feminist bases. Strangely cool, ultimately more successful as cultural history than psychological memoir, DeSalvo's book is nevertheless gripping in its parade of detail and profusion of stories about how ``a working-class Italian girl became a critic and writer.'' (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

An engaging look at the impact of depression on a life.
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.

A Necessary Book
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 thought this would be a good memoir..
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. :)