Lights in Cold Rooms - by Joan Cusack Handler (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

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

"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

"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

About the Author

Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has published three verse memoirs--GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded twenty-five years ago, and where she continues to serve as publisher.