“In this brilliant memoir, Lacy M. Johnson offers us a guide to the impossible—how to reconstruct a past when the past itself is shattered, each memory broken into pieces, left rattling around inside us. Sometimes flashes of poetry are all that we can find in the wreckage; sometimes these flashes are all that can possibly save us, brought together for brief, burning instants, and then let go. The Other Side bristles with life and energy and to read it is to be transformed.”
—NICK FLYNN, author of
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Lacy M. Johnson’s powerfully moving and brilliantly structured memoir, The Other Side, asks, ‘How is it possible to reclaim the body after devastating violence?’ Her intense desire and demand for a life lived in the body is triumphant. Johnson’s strength not only to free her physical self but also to move through years of incapacitating fear by writing this book, is breathtaking: ‘I lift the chain from my neck, over my head, let it rattle to the floor.’”
—KELLE GROOM, author of
I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl