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Published by She Writes Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
On a blustery Maine day, thirty-nine-year-old Roberta Kuriloff found herself standing on a plot of land purchased with her former partner, holding a couple of wood stakes to mark off exactly where her new house would sit. No longer their land. No longer their dream. Now, just hers.
Immersed in a world of blueprints, materials, contractors, and critters, Roberta confronted the major losses she’d suffered in her life—in particular the deaths of her mother and aunt from cancer and her separation from her father and brother during her placement in an orphanage—and to try to understand how those losses had shaped the woman, lawyer, and activist she’d become. As she cleared land, hammered nails, lifted beams, and shivered in her rented mobile home, the answers began to come to her.
Roberta soon found love again, with a woman named Nancy . . . only to lose her abruptly just one year later in a car accident. Her grief over Nancy’s death, and the psychic and out-of-body events she experienced following that loss, led to an eight-year spiritual quest where she explored her Jewish roots, the Kabbalah, Buddhism, and reincarnation. As she healed, new love beckoned with Bernice—and at long last Roberta found that intrinsic sense of self, that unshakable foundation of heart and soul, that home, that she’d been searching for all along.
Immersed in a world of blueprints, materials, contractors, and critters, Roberta confronted the major losses she’d suffered in her life—in particular the deaths of her mother and aunt from cancer and her separation from her father and brother during her placement in an orphanage—and to try to understand how those losses had shaped the woman, lawyer, and activist she’d become. As she cleared land, hammered nails, lifted beams, and shivered in her rented mobile home, the answers began to come to her.
Roberta soon found love again, with a woman named Nancy . . . only to lose her abruptly just one year later in a car accident. Her grief over Nancy’s death, and the psychic and out-of-body events she experienced following that loss, led to an eight-year spiritual quest where she explored her Jewish roots, the Kabbalah, Buddhism, and reincarnation. As she healed, new love beckoned with Bernice—and at long last Roberta found that intrinsic sense of self, that unshakable foundation of heart and soul, that home, that she’d been searching for all along.
Product Details
- Publisher: She Writes Press (July 18, 2023)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781647424961
Raves and Reviews
2023 Living Now Book Awards Silver Medalist in Inspirational Memoir - Female
“This remarkable memoir—one of the deepest I’ve ever read—is my kind of revelation. The book made me cry out, cover my eyes, mourn, beam with pride, and appreciate the trials that led to my own emotional and spiritual growth. Kuriloff’s story will find a place alongside Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother. Permeated with humility, bravery, and a bold feminist intersection, Framing a Life is a triumph for many of us with both hurting and joyful hearts. It will last in our times and long into the future.”
—June S. Gould, PhD, poet, workshop leader for the International Women’s Writing Guild, and author of The Writer in All of Us
“Framing A Life by Roberta S. Kuriloff is about the search for home, family, and love—yet is so much more. This story examines the grief of losing all we human beings long for in this world, but still moving forward with faith, love, and tenacity. You will smile. You will cry. Best of all, you will cheer on Roberta as she learns home is not necessarily a place. It is embedded in your core, your heart, and your soul.”
—Laura L. Engel, author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame, and Adoption in the 1960s
“Roberta Kuriloff uses the metaphor of home to deepen our understanding of belonging. Overcoming a stark life in a city orphanage, she becomes a lawyer driven to become a voice for abandoned and abused children and ultimately builds a home of her own in Maine to shelter her loved ones. An inspiring memoir about the construction and union of both an inner and outer life.”
—Maureen Murdock, PhD, author of The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory
“Roberta’s memoir is honest, poignant, and shares with grace how she overcame her life’s tragedies. Her courage, optimism, and the ways she found and built her true home—in the deepest sense of the word—will uplift and inspire many readers.”
—Rivvy Neshama, author of Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles
“Rarely have I read a memoir that was so captivating. Roberta Kuriloff’s resilience and tenacity in the face of adversity is inspiring. Through her work as a lawyer and her interactions with family and friends, she demonstrates what it means to be a compassionate feminist and a joyful, spiritual person.”
—Patricia Ould, PhD, co-author of Same-Sex Marriage, Context, and Lesbian Identity: Wedded but Not Always a Wife
“Framing A Life: Building The Space to Be Me is the story of one woman’s quest for self-understanding, love, and the meaning of home. On days when I despair that nothing much is going right, I look to Roberta and her courage, perseverance, and optimism. Her story could have been the story of a bitter woman, beaten down by life and loss. It is anything but. It is a shining light held aloft for any woman struggling to find that place within that is whole, complete and at peace.”
—Cathleen O'Connor, PhD, author of High Heels on the Hamster Wheel, The Everything Law of Attraction Dream Dictionary, and The Collection: Flash Fiction for Flash Memory
“Kuriloff tells her amazing story of resilience. This is the journey of her survival, her intense drive to succeed, and the later death of her partner—a woman she loved. Finding the surprising depths of her spiritual side, she not only relearns how to love, but she also relearns how to live. It is an intensely personal yet very relatable work.”
—Linda Bergman, screenwriter, producer, and author of So You Think Your Life’s A Movie: The Sequel
“In Framing a Life, Roberta S. Kuriloff constructs—from fragments of past scenes, journal entries, night dreams, changing states of being, and reflections—a textual home for herself and the reader to reside in, inside the territory of a culturally evolving America. This narrative—of a return to a whole and expanded self, one evoking Walt Whitman’s iconic line ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ —is a timely permission to illuminate the manifold pieces of one’s own life and reassemble them into a compassionate definition of oneself, alive at a certain moment, in a certain place, in human history.”
—Marj Hahne, writer, editor, and teacher
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