The Healing Circle - by Coco Picard (Paperback)

About the Book

"A mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died. Bedridden with a terminal diagnosis, memories, nurses, immoral doctors, foreign television broadcasts, and phone calls from children intrude upon her consciousness. An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is her primary companion"--

Book Synopsis

Bad New Age mother seeks miracle cure in Germany but encounters her past with an aloe plant instead.

Review Quotes

"The Healing Circle is a far-reaching, honest, and funny novel about dying and living, a kind of pilgrimage to wholeness through uncertainty and disorientation. Full of resonance, it asks what it means to heal, to be in pain, to be a person."

--Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

"The Healing Circle is wry, subtle, and daring. Coco Picard has written a vivid novel about living, dying, and remembering."

--Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

"A unique and inherently engaging novel about life, death, and dying, The Healing Circle showcases author Coco Picard's natural flair for crafting a novel of serious substance with a flair for humor in service to the human condition."

-- The Midwest Review

"The ultimate message of The Healing Circle is that death is inescapable, no matter how many strange remedies we pursue, no matter how hard we struggle to survive, and no matter how defiantly we rebuke its inevitability. This insight is nothing new. However, Picard explores this age-old truth in a fresh light, with a subtle tongue-in-cheek wit that recontextualizes the magnitude of death by always holding it towards the periphery.

-- Babi Oloko, LA Review of Books

About the Author

Coco Picard is a writer, cartoonist, and curator. She is the author of two graphic novels, Meowsers (forthcoming) and The Chronicles of Fortune (2017), which was nominated for a DiNKy Award. Art criticism and comics have otherwise appeared under the name Caroline Picard in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Paris Review, and Seven Stories Press, among others. She started the Green Lantern Press in 2005, received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute and was a Bookends Fellow at Stony Brook University.