ON THE LEDGE

Turner, an educator and former attorney, offers a debut memoir about searching for clarity amid anxiety.

In 2010, Turner was hit by a pickup truck when crossing a street in East Hampton, New York, resulting in a concussion and other injuries to her shoulder and back. On the resultant road to recovery she paid visits to a helpful acupuncturist and tried to cope at work, teaching classes despite dizziness and pain. Along the way, she found herself delving into an event in her family’s past that occurred when she was 4 years old and that significantly shaped her life. In 1957, in New Haven, Connecticut, Turner’s father, who suffered from deep depression, threatened to jump off a hotel window ledge but was talked out of it by a kind priest. Turner’s narrative moves back and forth between her own accident and her father’s near suicide as she seeks to understand and make peace with her relationship to mental illness. What results is an intriguing memoir that’s not one of self-pity—a topic she addresses in a story about her own mother—but one of self-discovery that many readers will find relatable. For example, Turner tracks her anxiety back to her earliest memories, when she and her three siblings were warned to never upset their father. Throughout the work, she effectively paints a vibrant picture of her family; her father was an aspiring writer and her mother, a giftedamateur tennis player, and both were political activists. Their stories shine as Turner shows their journeys as being intertwined with her own.

A frank and engaging portrait of one family’s struggles with mental illness.