I In this installment of OTBKB's recurring feature, Why I Wrote This Book, author Johanna Reiss shares with OTBKB readers why she wrote her powerful new book, A Hidden Life, a Memoir of August 1969 (Melville House Publishing).

Reiss is the author of The Upstair's Room (a Newberry Honor), a young adult classic about a hidden child during the holocaust. In the new book, she writes about the suicide of her husband.  Unlike The Upstairs Room, A Hidden Life is for adults.

Leslie Garis, in an enthusiastic review in the New York Times Book Review, writes "Reiss handles this difficult material by probing her memory for clues, putting facts and suppositions together in ferverish prose jutting back in forth in time…" The book was also selected as a Editor's Choice in the NY Times Book Review. 

Johanna Reiss will be reading at Barnes and Noble in Park Slope on May 5th at 7:30 p.m. 

Johanna Reiss writes:

I seem to deal with grief by writing about it. I did it with The Upstairs Room, the story of my time in hiding as a Jewish child living in Holland during the Holocaust.

And now there is my new memoir in which I "look" at what happened on August 24, 1969, the date and the year my husband killed himself here, in New York, while I was in Holland to talk to the family who  had sheltered me during WWII.

Excerpt:  How do you tell children that life is one continuous goodbye, that with each day the end comes a little nearer, each step, each touch, each sound, whether you're around to hear it or not, cars tooting, trains
whistling, boats hooting; how do you explain that people you're close to, or thought you were, can just vanish?

Another installment of OTBKB's occasional feature, Why I Wrote this Book, where Brooklyn authors share their latest work.

WHY I WROTE SIGNIFYING NOTHING
By Clifford Thompson

When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in Washington, D.C., my grandmother lived with our family. She was very old, and from my earliest memories she was practically deaf. She was a beloved member of the family, but every move the family made had to be planned around her, because she couldn’t be left by herself.

Fast-forward three decades to Brooklyn, where I am writing a novel about a guy named Lester: 19 years old, developmentally disabled, and mute. Lester has never said a word, until the day he suddenly begins rapping at the top of his lungs, throwing his family into a tizzy. Even more than before, his parents, brother, and sister have to figure out what to do about Lester, which leads to conflicts with one another. I had written about a third of the story when it occurred to me that I was really writing about . . . my grandmother.

I think Signifying Nothing will appeal to anyone who has issues with members of his or her own family — in short, anyone.

Excerpt from Signifying Nothing:

“On a spring evening in 1979, in the house where he had lived all of his nineteen years, Lester Hobbs did what no one had ever heard him do: he spoke. One moment he was galumphing across the living room in his undershirt and jeans, skinny arms swinging, hands trembling slightly as they sometimes did; the next, he stopped, arms going stiff at his sides, neck craning forward, a fierce expression taking over his normally placid, baby-smooth brown face. His words were not spoken in the soft, halting way that a thirteen-month-old says “Momma” for the first time; they were full-throated, even loud, like the words of a man accustomed to speaking authoritatively, a drill sergeant or film director. Even more surprisingly, they not only made sense — they were delivered with rhyme and rhythm. In short, the boy was rapping . . .”

The Body Broken: A Memoir by Lynne Greenberg (Random House, 2009).

 Why I Wrote This Book:

I thought this sounded like an interesting book so I asked author Hogan Hilling to do a Why I Wrote this Book. Even Mothering Magazine liked the book and had this to say. "It is so hard to find a male perspective on fathering. I really appreciate your empathy for fathers’ feelings about pregnancy and birth—the sense of responsibility, fear, helplessness, and the drive to provide. I love the description of how men feel during childbirth classes, how they object to being called coaches as well as their reluctance to share their feelings in a room full of women."

The Modern Mom’s Guide to Dads: 10 Secrets Your Husband Won’t Tell You by Hogan Hilling and Jesse Jayne Rutherford. (Cumberland House, October 2007).

I’ve led fathering workshops over the last fifteen years, and during that course of time, I’ve heard a lot about what other dads are really thinking, feeling, and afraid of when it comes to parenthood—things guys don’t normally tell their wives.

The idea for the book came about when moms started asking me to give them workshops on fathering because they wanted to hear what men had to say about being dads! I did, and I also wrote a book to share this information with women everywhere and, I hope, make their lives easier.

I get a lot of books in the mail. I am running out of space in my office and my apartment. Running out. We ran out years ago and should have moved. But that’s another story. I also don’t have nearly enough time to read them all. I thank you all for sending them to me. But here’s a new way to get your books on the blog: if I think your book sounds interesting (and I often do) I will ask you to write a short blurb called Why I Wrote This Book.