LEAPING PAST ZINNIAS

Tingley, a psychologist, recounts the challenges posed to her marriage by a family tragedy in this memoir.

The author was a romantic late bloomer—she didn’t meet her husband Richard until she’d reached the age of 40. His presence quickly dissipated the “lonely cloud” that had stubbornly hung over her life. Before they wed in 1998, she knew that he had struggled with depression, that his now deceased father was likely mentally ill, and that his brother Michael was a “high-functioning schizophrenic”; Tingley had wrestled with her own psychological trials, including a depression so severe she spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital. A horrific tragedy occurred when Michael stabbed his fiance, Carrie Costello, to death with a pair of kitchen knives. With incisive intelligence, the author chronicles the far-reaching ramifications of Michael’s psychotic episode, which seemed to unlock Richard’s own Pandora’s box of psychiatric vulnerabilities. As Richard felt more helpless and grew ever angrier, the author increasingly felt “dazzlingly alone,” and finally the marriage crumbled under the weight of the strain. With courageous candor, Tingley reflects on her own mental health issues and the sexual abuse she experienced as a child that fueled them. The author is a trained psychologist, and her analysis is rigorously analytical but never aridly academic—this is more a work of personal introspection than a case study. She finally comes to accept that her trauma is a part of her but does not define her, and she finds joy in this distinction—as well in a simple pot of flowers: “Looking at the zinnias, I am fully present. The sensation that I used to struggle to feel and had been rare for so long—what I call pure joy, what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’—instantly, wholly, fills me up.” Tingley’s remembrance is distinguished by a rare combination of intellectual sophistication and emotional sensitivity.

An exceedingly thoughtful meditation on a fraught life.