“A Tiny White Light” (She Writes Press, 312 pages, $17.99) is a memoir with many layers. Linda Bass of South Hadley begins her book with a description of an art exercise she performs in a mental institution in the early 1980s.
The narrative then loops back in time to the late 1960s, when her family moves to California from a small Wisconsin town as her parents’ marriage dissolves. Bass and her brother Brian are largely cast adrift.
She excels academically in college and graduate school but seems unable to form strong bonds with others. She sleeps with a number of men and marries two of them but wants to get out of relationships almost as soon as they form.
Her brother Brian is in worse shape. He cannot stay in school, he cannot hold down a job, and he barely functions on any level. His suicide is not a surprise. It leaves a gaping hole in his sister’s life, however. Both she and their mother feel guilt about their inability to keep him tied to life.
Bass moves with her second husband to his home turf, the Boston area. There they have two children and launch a business that plunges them into debt. Eventually, she begins seeing a therapist. She and her husband hope the therapist, Sam, will hypnotize her into giving up smoking.
Instead, her romantic feelings for Sam accelerate a mental breakdown that has apparently been coming for quite some time.
“A Tiny White Light” is uneven. In the early part of the book, as Bass describes her educational years and her two marriages, her prose is distant from her life. It describes many of her actions but doesn’t reflect on them.
It distances both Bass and her reader from her emotions, perhaps because at this point in her life she felt distanced from them herself.
When the author begins chronicling the ways in which her reality unravels and her spirit begins its descent into psychosis, however, the reader is effectively plunged into the alternate reality that her brain is creating.
She stops eating. She hallucinates that random occurrences happening in her home or on the street are some kind of sign from God, or more likely from Sam. She smokes and smokes and smokes.
Eventually, as the book’s opening has indicated, she is hospitalized. It takes weeks for drugs and therapy to bring her back to reality. Even as she begins to recover, she uses a lifelong habit of helping others while ignoring her own needs to put off confronting her troubles.
Eventually, Bass manages to return to reality. As time goes by, she reconnects with her children, finds employment, and divorces her husband. The book’s end fast-forwards to her current life in South Hadley after a successful career in workforce development in the Boston area.
As a reader, I was not quite sure precisely what turned Bass’s life and emotions around after her breakdown. She hides much of the detail around that from the reader, as she hides many of the feelings she has in the book’s early chapters.
It may be that she doesn’t understand precisely how she recovered, any more than she understands how she became ill.
Nevertheless, her description of her emotions while retreating from reality is vividly and skillfully written. She is honest and open with the reader when honesty and openness matter the most. And she produces a narrative that is powerful and unique.
Linda Bass will sign copies of her book at Barnes & Noble on Russell Street in Hadley on Saturday, Jan. 24, from 1 to 3 p.m.
The book’s official launch will take place at the South Hadley Public Library on Canal Street on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 6:30 p.m. Bass will talk there with Maria Galano, who teaches clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.