Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery

Rating:
Summary: Grief and joy interwoven in marvelous prose.
Review: More than just a story of surmounting physical illness (in Lazarre's case, breast cancer), this is a story in which physical survival becomes a metaphor for emotional healing. One of the book's great pleasures is its structure,for rather than tell her story from beginning to end, Lazarre explores how different memories echo and amplify one another: the bewildered pain of a young daughter at her mother's cancer death, the adult woman's successive responses to the loss of a therapist and a brother-in-law, and finally her own breast cancer diagnosis. While the subject matter may sound grim, the language and above all the author's quiet determination to honor her memories as part of her own living future left me with not only a sense of admiration for Lazarre's courage, but a heightened confidence in my own ability to make meaning in the aftermath of the deepest personal losses. Finally, this is an incredibly moving story of mothers and daughters, and of the ways in which a daughter's longing can, ironically, estrange her from the woman she fears to resemble. The clarity of the images and graceful simplicity of the prose are poetic without any of the fussiness of some works that bill themselves as prose poetry. Read it slowly. Reread.