Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery

Now in paperback
“In the spring of 1995, the condition I seem to have been waiting for all my life finally struck me.” So begins Jane Lazarre’s account of her transforming battle with breast cancer. Following in the tradition of her critically acclaimed literary memoirs, Lazarre brilliantly interweaves her struggle with a life-threatening illness and other stories of recent and past losses—most notably, coming to terms with having grown up a motherless child after losing her mother to breast cancer when Jane was a small child. Lazarre draws her strength from her faith in the power of storytelling to make bearable the seemingly unbearable. Her bravely and beautifully written account of grief, illness, and recovery is at the last a celebration of the redemptive possibilities of the creative spirit.

SIDEBAR:
“Jane Lazarre combines Adrienne Rich’s brazen approach to plumbing the psyche through language with a certain belief in personal narrative; her intense anxious attachment to her two sons; and her struggle to write.”—Mamm magazine

“Reading Lazarre’s latest is like spending time with a friend. It’s a story bound to move anyone who has ever experienced love or loss.”—Publishers Weekly

“Wet Earth and Dreams is a beautiful, engrossing, enormously moving book. It stirred me to the depths.”—Judith Rossner

“[Lazarre’s] best and most powerful work.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and The Art of the Personal Essay