Overview

Memory, grief, and self-reflection mingle in debut author Garza's account of the death of her sibling. The 52-year-old author recounts her experience with survivor's guilt, dissociation, and spirituality, as she undertook a long journey to reconstruct her identity. Throughout, the author illustrates, in observant, poetic prose, the reverberating effects that grief can have on a life and the many ways that her family has coped with it. Garza draws on multiple outside sources, including the work of Rebecca Solnit, the words of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to explore how people understand and interact with death and how they ultimately learn to accept it as a constant companion. An achingly vulnerable, elegantly worded meditation on grief and recovery. ―Kirkus Review

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9781737513490

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Reviews

At its Norse root, haunt, or heimta, means to lead home. That sense of loss and longing infuses Victoria Garza's profound journey to make sense of a childhood tragedy. Grappling with guilt and trauma through vignettes as sharp and luminous as stained glass, The Field opens a space between memory and dream where angels walk among us and death becomes a door. Garza reminds us it's emotions that matter and that grief is not an affliction, but a deep, abiding expression of love. -Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between This book is the song of the sister who died by the sister who survived. It is a distillation, a documentary, whose milestones are marked by St. Teresa, Dickinson, Neruda, Dante, the Gospel of Thomas, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you want to know how a family touches grief tenderly and respectfully as loss drills its terror, if you want to know how a ten-year-old confronts darkness, conducts a life, and delivers her heart back to its origins whole-read Garza's testimony, where a simple field in Ohio vibrates with the knowledge that the important matters weed themselves out and one is left with the essential nature of one's love. -Barbara Cully, author of Desire Reclining, The New Intimacy, and Shoreline Series

"At its Norse root, haunt, or heimta, means ""to lead home."" That sense of loss and longing infuses Victoria Garza's profound journey to make sense of a childhood tragedy. Grappling with guilt and trauma through vignettes as sharp and luminous as stained glass, The Field opens a space between memory and dream where angels walk among us and death becomes a door. Garza reminds us it's emotions that matter and that grief is not an affliction, but a deep, abiding expression of love. -Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between This book is the song of the sister who died by the sister who survived. It is a distillation, a documentary, whose milestones are marked by St. Teresa, Dickinson, Neruda, Dante, the Gospel of Thomas, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you want to know how a family touches grief tenderly and respectfully as loss drills its terror, if you want to know how a ten-year-old confronts darkness, conducts a life, and delivers her heart back to its origins whole-read Garza's testimony, where a simple field in Ohio vibrates with the knowledge that the important matters weed themselves out and one is left with the essential nature of one's love. -Barbara Cully, author of Desire Reclining, The New Intimacy, and Shoreline Series"

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