In Memoir Of Child's Death, A Mother Seeks Meaning
In her writing, Rapp is both fearless and vulnerable, and her expansive style artfully accommodates a dizzying array of emotion. By documenting the minutiae of her life (Reiki, onesies, Xanax, spin classes, Buddhist retreats, feeding tubes), she renders a gorgeous and grounding realism for this heady book. Her humanity makes her a compassionate guide into her harrowing life, yet the book continually asserts that we are all in the midst of the same mortal plunge. Ultimately Rapp's greatest power resides in her ability to create a philosophical treatise from such amorphous emotions. A reader might assume that she knows how this book will end, but that assumption is beautifully disproven by Rapp's constant ability to reinvent and redefine what the loss of her son ultimately means to her. Her insistent seeking is a vital part of the book's beauty. Like Rilke's entreaty, "You must change your life," Rapp's urgency is at once instructive and infectious.
Early on, Rapp discovers that part her new job as Ronan's mother will be to find his "quiet, gap-ridden myth, his idiosyncratic narrative — to interpret it, share it, and learn from it." The Still Point of the Turning World begins as a book about a parent's worst fear, a child's death, but it finally becomes a celebration of Ronan's life, a call to action that urges us, its readers, to be fierce in our loves and our lives. In a New York Times essay, Rapp asks, "How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?" This book is her response to that question. Rapp elegantly transforms her experience of mothering a child who will die into a tenuous understanding of mortality and loving "without a net, without the future, without the past ... right now."
Read an excerpt of The Still Point of the Turning World