Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures

My brother died almost three years ago, but it took me almost two years of Marcie Hershman's book sitting on my bedside table to get up the courage to read more than a few pages now and then. I finally finished the whole thing today, in one sitting, and am sorry now that I waited. It has been cathartic, enabling me to mourn and to cry in a way that I couldn't before. Her book is full of gentleness, love and writing that flows straight from her pen into our heart. In "Speak to Me" she crosses over boundaries and in between worlds as if they are water. Dreams, spiritual thought, a sometimes complicated childhood and the here and now of her brother Rob's TV producing - she does not limit herself because the story is not one of limits, but of expansion. She has touched a chord that those of us who have lost somebody can identify with. There are many of us who have probably heard the voices, and dreampt dreams about loved ones who are gone. Marcie Hershman, who writes so lovingly about her brother's voice, is, in fact, OUR collective voice to the world.

Not many books deal with the loss of a sibling and how the death of a brother or sister changes the way you see the world. I found this book extremely helpful to me, although I did not lose a brother, but my husband of sixteen years. Once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down. I started in the afternoon and kept reading through the night. I felt like I was having a heart to heart talk with a good friend. I was happy by how different it was from the usual "how to get over grief" type of book, full of rules and advice. Highly recommended.

Marcie Hershman's Speak to Me is simply one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. On one level this is "about" the death of a beloved sibling; on its other levels, it engages us in the power of the human voice to speak in so many ways about love -- the love that moves us out of grief and into a richer sense of our lives. That we might hear again our loved one's voice in dreams, or "play" that voice again on audio tape, or have it echo again in memory, and that there are mysteries, too--voice after death--all these aspects of our connection to each other Marcie Hershman reminded me of. She has wit, wisdom and an honesty that reveals the heart of the matter. Her ten meditations, so gorgeously written, and so deeply felt, told me not only about the special bond she and her brother Rob shared, but of the bond I too have felt with family members I have lost. There are so many voices I still long to hear. I am extraordinarily glad to have read Speak to Me. I urge others to read it and share it. This is beautiful, heart-stirring work!

To face your fears, to really dig down deep and write from the heart, is the biggest challenge for any writer. Marcie Hershman more than scales a mountain in SPEAK TO ME. This book is smart and serious yet it ends with such hope and joy, I was sad to put it down. Bravo! A beautiful tribute and memoir.

Marcie Hershman's moving, lyrical account of her brother's death and the chasm of yearning it carved in her life is a tale of revealing honesty and profound feeling. I am a true fan of Hershman's work -- Tales of the Master Race counts, for me, as one of the best books of the last decade, maybe any decade, and certainly one of the most important works every written about the Holocaust -- and her latest, though quite different in its subject, is just as transforming, suffused by the same kind of mature emotional intelligence. It's a weeper, but it soars, ultimately, toward the kind of victory we can only find at the far side of our deepest losses. A work of elegance, sorrow and triumphant truth.