Landscape without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief - Softcover

Ascher, Barbara Lazear

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140234950 ISBN 13: 9780140234954

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1994

Synopsis

In July 1989 Barbara Lazear Ascher learned that her brother, Bobby, had died of AIDS at the age of thirty-one. With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. This extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that "landscape without gravity."

Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another—a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a map for that "hero's journey" we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone—especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Lazear Ascher is the author of Playing After Dark (1986) and The Habit of Loving (1989). She lives with her husband in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

The death of her younger brother from AIDS at age 31, only months after he revealed his diagnosis to his family, sent Ascher on the unexpectedly wrenching journey of grief that makes up this unflinching and often lyrical chronicle. Acknowledging the distance that had developed between Bobby, a gay man and "a wild thing," and his family, who were "trained in New England restraint," Ascher ( The Habit of Loving ) determines to explore the love for him that she rediscovered in the profound loss she felt upon his death. A few months after attending his memorial service in New Orleans, she returns there on a "pilgrimage" to connect with Bobby's lover and his other friends; later, she joins a grief support group at her Manhattan church. But mostly, her book records the shifting shape and process of her sorrow. Marked by candor, humor, vivid imagery and a spirit of affirmation, this memoir covering a year's time expands upon a widely discussed "Hers" column Ascher wrote in the New York Times in 1989.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140234950
• ISBN 13: 9780140234954
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176