Description: An honest account of depression from poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler.
Lights in Cold Rooms shares Joan Cusack Handler's personal experiences with depression as a licensed psychologist with forty years of experience treating patients. For many, including Handler, quarantine precluded the preferred treatment of psychotherapy. Handler turned to her own pathology to teach herself and others how to navigate both isolation and depression. Feelings of anxiousness and impending mortality intensified as she faced the death of her older sister and grappled with the guilt that erupted when she learned that an in-person memorial service was impossible. Opening both her personal history and pathology to public view, Handler chronicles her confrontation with eighty years of family dynamics and explores the path she took to return to a place of hope.Brief description: Joan Cusack Handler is the founder of CavanKerry Press. She is a poet, memoirist, and a psychologist in clinical practice. She is the author of four books, most recently, Orphans.
Review Quotes:
In her compelling memoir, Handler dons two hats. The first is as a poet who enriches the text with her beautiful poetic flair. The second, her psychologist's hat, enables her to dive with courage into her feelings and thoughts. Handler shares with the readers her early years growing up with hardworking Irish immigrant parents, who struggle to support a family of six and are frequently harsh on the children. However, as Joan enters adolescence, her mother introduces joy to her life by designing and sewing beautiful clothes for her. Similarly, Handler is able to enjoy her stern father's wisdom and kindness in his later years. We also learn about the universal struggle of sibling rivalry as well as the devastating loss of her sister during COVID. In this way, Handler enables and inspires readers to integrate the good and bad experiences with family members into a whole, and we are inspired by Joan's gift of counteracting pain and suffering with the wisdom of seeking and finding love and happiness.
--Rivka Bekerman-Greenburg PhD, psychoanalyst and playwright