The Still Point of the Turning World - Softcover

Rapp, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444775979 ISBN 13: 9781444775976

Publisher: Two Roads, 2014

Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
With a new chapter detailing the events that have taken place since Ronan's passing in February 2013.

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her son, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, level-headed but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education.

But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months. Rapp and her husband were forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about raising a family. They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment; to find happiness in the midst of sorrow; to parent without a future.

The Still Point of the Turning World is the story of a mother's journey through grief and beyond it. Rapp's response to her son's diagnosis was a belief that she needed to 'make my world big' - to make sense of her family's situation through art, literature, philosophy, theology and myth. Drawing on a broad range of thinkers and writers, from C.S. Lewis to Sylvia Plath, Hegel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Rapp learns what wisdom there is to be gained from parenting a terminally ill child. In luminous, exquisitely moving prose, she re-examines our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a good parent, to be a success, and to live a meaningful life.

About this title

Review:

A radiant book steeped in deep feelings. (Los Angeles Times)

Rapp combines an essayist's willingness to lay herself bare on the page, a theologian's search to plumb the mysteries of life and a poet's precision. (The San Francisco Chronicle)

Rapp has written a beautiful and passionate elegy for her son, a book that offers deep wisdom for any reader. (The Boston Globe)

A brilliant study of the wages of mortal love. (The New York Times)

A beautiful, searing exploration of the landscape of grief and a profound meditation on the meaning of life. (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

Unflinching and unsentimental, Rapp's work lends a useful, compassionate, healing message for suffering parents and caregivers. (Publishers Weekly (Starred Review))

Emily Rapp has written an intimate, compelling and often unexpectedly funny story that speaks to some of the most universal truths of being human. More than just a narrative, this is art, not to mention essential reading. (Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story)

Rapp has an emotional accessibility reminiscent of Wild author Cheryl Strayed; her unique experiences have a touch of the universal. She comes across as open, midthought. In her book, she wrestles with the ideas of luck and sentimentality and life and love and often circles back, unresolved. Despite being a former divinity student, she bypasses religion for literature, seeking meaning in poetry, myth and, especially, Frankenstein and its author, Mary Shelley... Her kind of parent? The dragon mother: powerful, sometimes terrifying, full of fire and magic. (Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times, 'Faces to Watch in 2013')

It's hard to find words that do justice to Emily Rapp's The Still Point of the Turning World. It's one of those rare books that you want to press into people's hands and simply say, "You must read this. You will thank me." At every turn, Rapp avoids the maudlin and the expected to get at very deep truths, sometimes painful and sometimes liberating and sometimes both. She looks for wisdom and comfort to a wide range of sources ranging from C.S. Lewis to Marilynne Robinson to Buddhist teaching. And she looks to her son. This is one family's story of living while facing death, but also an astonishingly generous work about recognizing the pain and grace that exist all around us. (Will Schwalbe, bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club)

Emily Rapp didn't want to tell this story. She had to. That necessity is evident in every word of this intelligent, ferocious, grace-filled, gritty, astonishing starlight of a book. (Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild)

Book Description:

A New York Times bestseller, The Still Point of the Turning World is Emily Rapp's arresting eulogy for her late son Ronan: a mother's experience raising a terminally ill child, and what it taught her about family, grief and parenting. This paperback edition includes a new chapter detailing the events that have taken place in Rapp's life since Ronan's passing in February 2013.

About this edition

• Publisher: Two Roads
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1444775979
• ISBN 13: 9781444775976
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272