Small Mercies

By Barbara McCauley

Book Overview

Small mercies. The art of living. Volume 2A second collection of my daily blogs. The writing is spontaneous. The images are all my original art. I said many years ago, I wanted my art to be about the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1890932043
• ISBN13: 9781890932046
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Sherman Asher Publishing
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

My highest recommendation

Small Mercies by Barbara McCauleyI first read Small Mercies while it was still in galley form, before it went to press. I was afraid to read it-and I am not usually afraid of books. But this was a book about the aftermath of a suicide in the family and I was still quaking from that event in my own life. The man in my life for ten years had committed suicide less than a month before with no warning, no reason I could grasp. I was afraid that this would just be a new-age band-aid with condescending slogans and glib rationalizations. I was in no mood for any cheap slogans or insights you can mumble your way through on afternoon talk shows.Then, on the second page I read "Memory is fiction enough, that realm in which we create our own life stories." and I knew that I could trust this author, and this book, with my raw feelings. McCauley is a skilled writer who knows the truth of her own life without varnish or pretense and this is a book I read and then re-read during that difficult time. But this is not a self-help or how-to title. McCauley's writing has the kind of inner light in it that Vemeer had in his quiet paintings.Small Mercies is a carefully crafted memoir moving from dazzling moments that felt like creased candid snapshots of childhood and sisterhood-that reservoir of human tenderness I needed to locate again in myself to ever allow any real healing-and the struggle to assign blame, the consuming anger, that self-sabotage of numbness that is the legacy of those left alive after suicide. In short, she knows. And miraculously she manages to get that knowing on paper.I give this book my highest recommendation.