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

"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.