Böcker av Lori Jakiela

Her 70-year-old, cancer-stricken mother kills snakes with a broom. Her best friend believes in psychics and the Virgin Mary. Her new neighbor steals her CDs and her aunt sneaks cheese curls into the house. After seven years in New York, Lori Jakiela gives up her job as an international flight attendant and her dreams of becoming a writer, and returns home to Pittsburgh to take care of her dying mother. A loving but befuddled daughter, Jakiela stumbles to find her new life while sleeping in her childhood bed and teaching writing to students who hate to read. Unexpected love, expected loss, the struggle to find our own families, THE BRIDGE TO TAKE WHEN THINGS GET SERIOUS is the story of mothers and daughters, the debts we pay, and the new lives we build for ourselves when we least expect them.

They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice is much more than a cancer memoir. It's a meditation on living. It's a pause between polarities. Cancer is almost an afterthought. Inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, it celebrates the tiny moments that spotlight the miracle of being alive, the messiness of being human. Rice is a weirdly funny book about mortality. It's about family, genetics, nature vs. nurture, the Rust Belt, EPA clean-up zones, and more. Modeled on the work of stream-of-consciousness writers (Richard Brautigan, Virginia Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson), the book explores the way a mind works-complete with leaps and spirals-while reflecting on a life thoroughly lived against a dire breast cancer diagnosis.

After her adoptive mother's death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, Jakiela also finds herself with a need to uncover her family's medical history to gather answers for her daughter's newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves. Desires for emotional resolution comingle with concerns of medical inheritance and loss in this honest, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir.