The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma - Paperback

by Helen Epstein (Author)

This intrepid memoir tracks sexual abuse in the life of a veteran American journalist. It also describes the long and successful psychotherapy the author undertook to heal. The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma "invents its own genre," wrote Sherry Turkle. "The author suspects sexual abuse in her childhood and investigates with the toolkits of an historian and ethnographer." The result is a memoir that is what Eva Hoffman calls, "a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self."

This memoir is the third of a non-fiction trilogy, following Helen Epstein's Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Putnam, 1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History (Little, Brown, 1997), both widely translated. As Gloria Steinem wrote, "In Epstein's hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction but more magnetic."

"Clear-eyed, fearless, taboo-breaking... This trilogy is unusual not only because nearly 40 years separate the first and last volumes - with the second positioned midway at the 20-year mark - but also because the works differ so greatly in style, structure, and content... The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma's major contribution is its willingness to talk openly and place forefront a personal trauma of sexual abuse in its post-Holocaust context... Helen Epstein has consistently rejected sanitizing Jewish history - including women's history... She has refused to keep secrets that she knew needed to be told and she has avoided idealization, nostalgia, and hagiography." - Irena Klepfisz, Tablet Magazine

"Epstein takes the reader through her decades-long process of self-discovery, understanding and healing accomplished through a strong bond of friendship, a solid and supportive family, and the powerfully restorative effects of psychoanalysis... written with page-turning clarity, openness and complete honesty... This is a ground-breaking memoir in style and in its contribution to the issues of sexual abuse." - Berkshire Eagle

"In this poignant, vividly written and fearlessly frank memoir, Helen Epstein probes, with sensitivity and insight, the multi-layered ambiguities of love, intimate relationships, and post-Holocaust American lives. More than a chronicle of events, this is a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self." - Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation

"In midlife, well settled in marriage and motherhood, Epstein is impelled to revisit the legacy of her childhood. As she risks both her own sanity and the relationships she holds most dear, Epstein illustrates the complex moral and psychological effects of trauma, and the gritty process of recovery." - Judith Herman, M.D., author of Trauma and Recovery

"This is heroic writing, and belongs in the canon of accounts of mothers and daughters, of wounds lost in the depth of childhood, and the valiant determination of a woman to live in uncertainty with grace." - Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories

"In this riveting book, Helen Epstein probes the dark corners of her childhood with sensitivity and remarkable candor. This memoir reads like a detective story and asks questions that affect us all: how does our sexual nature get formed or deformed, and how can it change? Unflinching writing." - Anne Karpf, author of The War After: Living with the Holocaust

"Courageously peeling back layers of her own psyche, Helen Epstein describes how one is able to withstand and survive trauma, and perhaps even more difficult to heal from it... Epstein offers a riveting cultural history of America in the late twentieth century." - Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence

Author Biography

Helen Epstein (helenepstein.com) is a veteran journalist and author or co-author of ten books, including Children of the Holocaust, the first book on intergenerational transmission of trauma; Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History; and the biography Joe Papp: An American Life. All were named among the best books of the year by the New York Times. She is also the translator of Heda Margolius Kovály's Under a Cruel Star. Born in Prague, she grew up in New York City and graduated from Hunter High School and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her reviews and articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines. She blogs for artsfuse.org, the Boston cultural website.