This expansive memoir travels back and forth through time, dwelling in deeply personal detail on Rapp Black’s efforts to forge a new life while still honoring and learning from the old ... In Sanctuary, [Black] writes about [her son's] death with elegant poise and a tenderness that is equal parts raw and generous ... she writes with fierce honesty and zero sentimentality, in a way that distinguishes her from many others who write about grief and trauma ... Rapp Black’s exquisite prose is as compelling as her intellectual rigor ... In the end, Sanctuary is not a memoir of grief or of survival, but rather simply a story about living. Rapp Black is astute and sensitive, and she invites readers to bear witness to the intimate, intense, and profound experiences of losing and gaining so much.
Sanctuary is, over all, a brutal book to read. Black’s power as a writer means she can take us with her to places that normally our minds would refuse to go. But the narrative also takes us to places we perhaps don’t belong: for example, deep down in the weeds of her meaner-than-ever ex-marriage ... We come away feeling like guests at a nightmare dinner party, left to pick up broken glass after one of the hosts has made a scene . We also, as readers, would have been better off not having to trail Black through her long meditations on topics like time, memory, dark matter, Holocaust youth diaries and 'the elegant imbalance of butterflies,' digressions that would have made — that do make, taken individually — marvelous single sentences ... At the very start of Sanctuary, Black describes helping people 'order the chaos of their lives through storytelling.' That goal lies at the heart of her — of any writer’s — life’s work. With just a little more editing, this otherwise often beautiful jewel of a book would have gotten there.
On these pages, [Black] refuses to usher the reader through the tidy, well-bordered stages of grief. Instead, she is rebuilding a life in ways that are messy, erratic, and devastating while finding moments of joy, strength, and resilience, a word she’s wrestled with ... When the prose rises in the early sections, it really soars. However, the prose often felt flat, shadowed by the poetic epigraphs at the start of each chapter ... The glimpses of brilliance — lines that readers will most certainly highlight and carry with them — start coming, in these later chapters, with ferocity. When Black stops moving in scenes and starts to write from her intellect, the work becomes brutally compelling ... Faced with the impenetrable nature of grief, Black has found a way in, one she excavates and fills with light.
The great work of this memoir is not just that it grapples with the unthinkable—'How does one prepare to witness her child’s death?'—but that it urgently pushes past the worst possible thing to what lies beyond ... It is Black’s willingness to implicate herself that makes this book compulsively readable ... Sanctuary’s narrative voice hits as uniquely credible ... As the title suggests, Sanctuary creates a safe space for grief in all its forms ... Books like Black’s offer us sanctuary, and remind us we are not alone.
It goes without saying that Black is a gorgeous writer. Her first two books...met with deserved acclaim. Still, it should be said: first, because this is a review, and gorgeous counts; second, because with a book like this we might forget to remark on the prose and offer condolences instead ... Black’s voice is singularly lyrical, singularly bracing. She is obsessed with the potency of language, offering favorite phrases and lines, sometimes contextualizing but more often quoting with the confidence of a reader who has made the sentences her own ... How bolstered I felt when I read those words, and when I finished this book. Sadder, happier, human-er. Grateful for the sanctuary.
If you are someone feeling a hurt that will never go away, someone who would be affirmed and comforted by real stories of people moving forward while wounded, then Black’s new memoir will be a balm to you, too.
Rapp Black (The Still Point of the Turning World) shines in this stirring account of life after the death of her son Ronan ... The prose is lyrical and hypnotic but never overwrought or contrived. This is a mesmerizing and unforgettable tale.
Not so much a traditional memoir as a series of essays of varying lengths, the book doesn't follow a straightforward narrative arc, as Rapp Black attempts to understand her feelings and irresolvable conflict from multiple angles. She employs a variety of metaphors—dark matter in one chapter, butterflies in another—which may leave some readers impatient even as they clearly delineate her abiding mental state. A searing, uncompromising effort to wrestle with permanent grief.
