SHORELINE

A memoir in essays about making connections across great distances.

Nayman, a clinical psychologist and a fiction and nonfiction writer, brings her storytelling skills to bear in her poignant memoir. Unfolding across standalone chapters, the book explores connections with lost friends, her children, and her mother, who continues to be a complicated character in the author’s life even years after her death. “To live is to grieve,” Nayman writes, ruminating on the deaths of close friends and both of her parents, as well as imagining the impact her own future passing will one day have on her children: “Shorelines never only offer welcome; they’re ever hearkening departure.” Born in South Africa, raised in Australia, and now living in New York, Nayman is no stranger to departure, yet her sense of connection with place and people remains rich. Nayman also returns to her Jewish heritage, inspiring thoughtful interactions with writers such as Joseph Roth and with ideas like postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe how trauma transmits between generations. Through the exploration of Hirsh’s idea, Nayman examines her relationship with her mother in a brilliant chapter that straddles fiction and nonfiction. In artful prose and well-crafted stories about the different relationships with places and people that she has held throughout her life, Nayman shows how “full-bodied relationships are like works of art, defined by hiddenness and shadow, by the bits of emptiness and silence, by the unsayable.”

A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space.