Crossing Back
Books, Family, and Memory without Pain
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From the award-winning author of Crossing Ocean Parkway, a personal memoir about adjusting to loss through books, meditation, and the process of memory itself
Marianna De Marco Torgovnick experienced the rupture of two of her life’s most intimate relations when her mother and brother died in close proximity. Mourning rocked her life, but it also led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Her resulting journey into the past imagines a viable future and raises questions acute for Italian Americans but pertinent to everyone, about the nature of memory and the meanings of home at a time, like ours, marked by cultural disruption and wartime. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain presents a personal perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal.
A sequel to her award-winning and much-anthologized Crossing Ocean Parkway, Crossing Back is about close familial ties and personal loss, written after the death of her remaining birth family, who had always been there, and now were not. After their loss, she entered a spiritual and psychological state of “transcendental homelessness”: the feeling of being truly at home nowhere, of being spiritually adrift. In a grand act of symbolic reenactment, she found herself moving apartments repeatedly, not realizing she did so subconsciously to keep busy, to stave off grief. By reading and studying great books, she opened up to mourning, a process she constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. Over time, she discovered that a third death colored and prolonged her feelings of grief: her first child’s death in infancy, which, in the course of a happier lifetime, had never been adequately acknowledged. Her new losses led her finally to take stock of her son’s death too. Reading and meditating, followed by writing, became daily her healing rituals.
A warm and intimate user’s guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the end-point being memory without pain, Crossing Back is a wide-ranging memoir about growing older and learning to ride the waves of change. Lively and conversational, Torgovnick is masterful at tracking the moment-to moment, day-to-day challenges of sudden or protracted grief and the ways in which the mind and the body seem to search for—and sometimes find—solutions.
Marianna Torgovnick looks back without anger, but with compassion and acceptance, even for herself, at her life and successful career. Re-examining key elements of her past, including ethnic mobility, family quarrels, unfinished grieving, professional crises, moves, separations, and re-inventions, she writes a new life narrative. A generous, and relatable memoir that will chime with the feelings of many readers at this post-pandemic time of reflection and emergence.---Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita of English, Princeton University
We face mortality with frenetic energy: in turns, protesting its injustice, delaying its arrival, and organizing in its aftermath. As the most ordinary of events and the most spectacular, death measures the erosion of the social fabric. Atlanta spas, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and many more terms have come to signify loss not only of individuals but also of the civic structures that we inhabit. Crossing Back demonstrates how we grieve in this time of mourning. Ornately detailing practices like reading and meditation as responses to personal bereavement, the memoir movingly demonstrates how to hang on and to let go of the people and things we love.---Sean Metzger, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
Rich in personal detail and expansive in its exploration of family relationships, an enduring marriage, and the death of her mother and brother, Crossing Back also includes delightful meditations on elephants and children’s books, food, yoga, and our fascination with empty cities. Marianna Torgovnik’s searching effort to come to terms with the inevitable changes and losses that life has brought her way, has thoughtful lessons to convey about the importance of grieving and remembering throughout one’s life.---Janice Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies and Director, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Northwestern University
...intelligent and well written, at times intimately personal and at other times analytical, metaphorical, and coolly rational... the interweaving of narratives, analysis, and life figures and the topical inclusions are correlated with skill and compassion.---Choice
Prologue | ix
Acknowledgments | xiii
Introduction | 1
Part I. Facing Grief
1. Living Tissue | 13
2. Imagining Disaster | 27
3. Mother’s Day | 34
Part II. Sustaining Things
4. Second Chances | 47
5. College Teaching and Culture Wars or: What Really Happened at Duke | 58
6. Elephants: A Meditation on Mortality | 71
Part III. Memory without Pain
7. Food as Anthropological Lens | 85
8. Real Estate / Unreal Estate | 98
The Stark but Familiar Allure of Empty Cities: An Epilogue | 109
Notes | 115
Index | 127
