Fred Nenner

Fred Nenner is a psychotherapist, recently retired medical ethicist and writer living and working in New York City.

He began writing to make sense of the sadness, hardship and life’s tragedies that inhabited his professional life; bearing witness to illness, being in the intimate space of acute grief when a doctor gives news that no one ever wants to hear, and guiding families through those final decisions when enough is enough. His essays in narrative medicine are widely published in the medical literature.

Last Rites, his first novel, a mystery with a macabre twist, grew from his work in the hospital when the very sick turned to clergy to sustain them through their ordeals. From this bred a story of an undertaker who fashions himself the master of the rituals and sacraments of the church, a priest who comforts the dying as he stumbles with the Latin liturgy, and the bizarre happenings on the mortuary slab.

His soon to be published second book, Finding Maria, is the story of a girl from a remote valley on the Chicon in Peru. This psychological exploration of ‘becoming’ brings the reader though Maria’s conflicts as a child of the mystical of her Ancestors and Elders, her cultural dislocation, and her own sexuality and sexual identity.