It’s a feel-good tale of triumph, but one that frequently gets distracted from its purpose.
A memoir of Falack’s movement from painfully obsessed victim to Kripalu-certified yoga instructor.
In her formative years of frizzy hair and grades low enough to class her with a student who had Down syndrome, Falack was all too acquainted with feeling abnormal. But she didn’t know to question the normality of escaping from bad situations by counting—counting ceiling tiles, freckles within each tile, the facial features of people she was talking to, the number of letters in a neon sign and more. While there are early allusions to grim memories regarding her nanny, Naomi, Falack reports it wasn’t until a hypnosis session with her first psychiatrist that she confronted the residual terror left by Naomi’s stomach-churning breed of abuse. This revelation is pivotal to the titular journey; much of what the author describes, at length, is not. A detailed depiction of the young romance that blossomed into marriage, for instance, might fit if it was woven together with Falack’s reflections and fears about what she didn’t yet know to call a condition. As is, this section and others like it only upstage her struggles. Falack continued slipping out of the present moment and into the safety enumeration offered through her pot-smoking, mouthy, boy-crazed high school years and on into marriage and motherhood. Not until she was a grown woman having braved turbulent childbirths and her husband’s battle with addiction did she go to the psychiatrist who would finally diagnose her. She turned to Dr. Levine shortly after beginning yoga class; she credits the meditative aura of yoga with helping her recognize just how aggressive her bouts of counting had grown. On the tail of learning that her problem had a name, she learned that OCD was treatable with medicine—a variety of medicines actually. She went through the medication turnstiles in an attempt to rid herself of side effects from cottonmouth to night sweats that left her soaked. With the thought in mind that there had to be a better solution, she became more involved with yogic practices and retreats, eventually making the ascension from student to teacher.
It’s a feel-good tale of triumph, but one that frequently gets distracted from its purpose.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452079189
Page Count: 189
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Rather tedious ramblings of a middle-aged, handicapped lesbian trying to decide whether her spiritual home is a Zen center in California or a meditation retreat in New York. Tollifson, whose lack of a right hand made her an outsider from birth, says that by the age of 33 she had ``tried alcohol and drugs of every kind, sex of all imaginable varieties, several forms of therapy, and revolution.'' A radical feminist committed to revolutionary violence when she first encountered Zen practice, she soon became a resident of the Berkeley Zen Center and even pictured herself becoming a priest there. Before this could happen, however, Toni Packer, a New York teacher of a form of meditation lacking the rituals and paraphernalia of Zen, captured her imagination. Enthralled with Packer, Tollifson left Berkeley and entered Packer's Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry and Retreats. From 1988 to 1995, the eight-year period that is the focus of this memoir, Tollifson ricocheted between these two centers, continually searching not just for a spiritual home but for the perfect one. To a nonpractitioner of meditation, her concern over whether it is better to meditate on a cushion or in an armchair seems petty, her hero worship of her teachers seems juvenile, and her repeated changes of mind about the form of meditation that is right for her become wearisome. What Tollifson skims over and what might have made an interesting story is her transformation from a drug-dealing addict and alcoholic living in bars to an ultraleftist dedicated to fomenting revolution and then to a sober and celibate meditator. Tollifson's life has not been an ordinary one, and if she chose to, she could undoubtedly tell an extraordinary story. A mostly dull, often repetitious exercise in self-indulgence.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-88792-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bell Tower/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
A poetic, searingly personal book about a subject much of society would prefer to ignore. Francisco was a happily married 20-something writer and assistant editor when a rapist entered her apartment while her husband was away and brutally raped her. The act itself only took moments (although he spent several hours mentally torturing her), but her recovery took years. Novelist Francisco (Cold Feet, 1988, etc.) chronicles that recovery here in a book that is personal and yet universal enough to offer hope to others who have faced similar trauma. Francisco has an enviable feel for language. Her prose is by turns subtle and shockingly direct, just as rape itself is simultaneously blunt and violent and an insidious spiritual attack whose wounds fester internally long after the actual act has been committed. Francisco chillingly chronicles the act itself and the various methods she used to cope. “My most deeply held belief about my experience of rape is that, by talking, I saved my life,” she writes. “I had a small chance and it arrived like an opening in traffic. I knew exactly what to do with it. Tell. Talk about yourself. Spill it.” Unafraid to bare her soul as a writer as well, Francisco walks the reader through the failure of her marriage (80 percent of marriages involving a rape victim fail, one counselor tells her) to her slow, painful reawakening to her self and life through a variety of therapies, including body treatments such as massage and energy work. “I’ve come to believe that the body’s memory is as deep and unacknowledged as our dreams. Both fall outside language, their messages carried in image and sensation.” Francisco is not afraid to tell. We all must be brave enough to listen. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019291-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
