Lights in Cold Rooms

"As an account of a woman grappling with depression, this book is compelling in its unflinching honesty. It is, however, more than that. Joan Handler delves into the tangle of a mother and two daughters and how the wages of love and loss, of compassion and alienation play out over the course of a lifetime and how a degree of wisdom is possible for someone who is willing to look deep and hard. Being balanced about our suffering is one of the great challenges in this world. Joan Handler meets that challenge with grace in this book."

  -- Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel

"In the splendidly candid Lights in Cold Rooms, with courage as her method and writing as her tool, poet and psychotherapist Joan Cusack Handler creates a memoir of the unconscious life. Handler faced a crisis in her own mental health as she aged, and as a palliative she undertook a review of her family relationships, shining a therapist’s light, with a poet’s metaphors, into the cold rooms of the past. At the age of ten, she was almost six feet tall, and Handler’s spine has affected her physical and emotional health for eight decades. This book, “the homework of therapy,” as she calls it, has spine. Here is a record of a woman’s aging and depression as well as her vigorous willingness to examine life with spirit and gratitude. Joan Cusack Handler’s rich insights make Lights in Cold Rooms a book for all of us as we accumulate the layers of our years."

-- Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box