Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness - Hardcover

Hemley, Robin

3.8

71 ratings by Goodreads

9781555972783: Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555972780 ISBN 13: 9781555972783

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1998

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The evidence at hand: an autobiography-- complete with their mother's edits-- written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published as fiction; perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. But Hemley, hampered by a "larcenous heart" that covets his sister's story for himself, discovers that finding the truth in any life-- even one's own-- is a fragmented and complex task.

Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for God. It is also a look at what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and the sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator.

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Review:

Robin Hemley, author of the illuminating nonfiction book "Turning Life into Fiction," relates the poignant story of his brilliant but schizophrenic sister, Nola, who died at age 25. But it is more than just her story; this is a tender examination of a talented life lost too soon, and of a family that loved each other desperately, despite the pain that Nola's illness cost them all.

Hemley takes the memoir form further than mere recollection of familial events, and delves into the arena of imagination and what if. His mission to tell Nola's story is complicated by the fickleness of family members' memories, the mystic nature of much of Nola's work, and his own admission that he covets her strange and wonderful story himself. The result is a surprising and honest process of both writing and discovery--finding the "facts" and revealing the truths about the way we remember and what we try to forget. This is not a book to rush through, but one to savor and think about for a good long time. --Susan Swartwout

From the Back Cover:

Nola

"Nola is really the biography of a family, by a writer who understands the complex inter-relationships between people who love each other helplessly. Robin Hemley investigates the shifting space that so often separates spiritual quest from insanity, divides a healthy search for the light from a dangerous staring at the sun. And finally, this is a writer's story, painful, edgy, honest, and humble before mysteries even the best observer and family archivist will never understand."--Rosellen Brown

"Robin Hemley has given us a haunting, strange, and beautifully luminous work in Nola, a portrait of the artist's quest for fulfillment complete with all its attendant sorrows and joys. Powerful, moving, genuinely gut-wrenching without losing its own sense of humor and pathos, Nola is one of the best works of nonfiction I have read in years."--Bret Lott

"An eloquent elegy to his sister (possibly a suicide and almost certainly a saint), Robin Hemley's Nola is the extraordinarily moving story of a rational man's education into mystery and magic." --David Shields

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