If the Spirit Moves You - Hardcover

Picardie, Justine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573222119 ISBN 13: 9781573222112

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2002

Synopsis

Told in a series of journal entries, a touching memoir traces a year in the life of the author as she deals with the death of her sister from breast cancer, detailing the many important people in her life including her parents, her husband, her children, and the spiritualists she consults, and revealing how a bond between sisters defies death and lasts forever. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

If the Spirit Moves You chronicles the true life story of British Vogue writer Justine Picardie's desperate effort to contact her deceased youngest sister. In a year's worth of journal entries, Picardie shares a common theme for those who are grieving a death: the intense yearning to fill the cavernous void, to hear her sister's voice. (Picardie's sister's story Before I Say Goodbye chronicles her death from cancer.) Initially, this memoir repeats the same struggle: Picardie tries yet another cockamamie contact-dead-people machine or meets with yet another charlatan medium and comes up feeling more isolated than when she started. Things begin to shift when Picardie encounters a medium who sees Ruth on a bicycle (she rode her bike everywhere) wearing her favorite linen shirt and promising Picardie that the two sisters will speak again someday. And yet, Picardie still feels empty. Finally, a massage therapist tells Picardie, "You know, you can't bring back the dead, but you can make your children happy."

"This seems to me like the best advice I've heard for some time," Picardie writes. And from here she begins the deeper spiritual work at hand: committing to the land of the living, accepting the limitations of death, while still being willing to love and silently engage in dialogue with her sister without a shred of proof of life after death to cling to. --Gail Hudson

About the Author:

Justine Picardie is a journalist working most recently at British Vogue and as editor of the Observer Magazine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1573222119
• ISBN 13: 9781573222112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288