A LIFE IN LIGHT

A writer discovers herself in a new light.

Psychologist Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia and Women Rowing North, reflects on aging, loneliness, and happiness in a serene, gently told memoir. Since childhood, the author has been drawn to light—“my intoxicant of choice,” she writes—which has lifted her out of fear and depression. Her childhood was troubled by her father’s unpredictable anger and her mother’s inability to offer the close nurturing Pipher yearned for. Others did, however: her grandmother, “one of the first people,” Pipher writes, “who did the hard work of loving me into existence”; and a kind woman who taught her ceramics. “There were two kinds of light in that studio—the shafts coming through the western windows in late afternoons and the love beaming from my teacher’s heart,” she writes. Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, Pipher’s world opened up when she attended the University of Kansas during the rebellious 1960s. The author recounts the trajectory of her life after graduating from Berkeley in 1969, becoming pregnant, and, when her son was a toddler, beginning a doctoral program in clinical psychology, which led to careers as a therapist and writer. Writing, she says, has afforded her “the light of living life twice, once in real time and once in reflective time.” Now long married, with middle-aged children and grandchildren off to college, Pipher has “found it difficult to accept a cycle of life in which children grow up and leave their parents, and in which we parents become more and more peripheral.” Loneliness has been intensified by the pandemic. “If the first part of my life was about building attachments,” writes the author, “the last two years have been about learning to detach. I am making an effort to find the love and warmth I need in my own heart.” Even during the enforced isolation of lockdown, she continues to find solace in the light.

Sensitive meditations from a “solar-powered” writer.