In the opening of Holding Silvan, Monica Wesolowska gives birth to her first child, a healthy-seeming boy who is taken from her arms for “observation” when he won’t stop crying. Within days, Monica and her husband have been given the grimmest of prognoses for Silvan. They must make a choice about his life. The story that follows is not of typical maternal heroism. There is no medical miracle here. Instead, we find the strangest of hopes. In clear and unflinching prose, this startling memoir bears witness not only to a son’s brief life but to the evolution of the writer herself – from Catholic girl yearning after sainthood to maternal struggle to give her son the best she can. The result is a page-turning testimony to the power of love. By raising ethical questions about how a death can be good in the age of modern medicine, Holding Silvan becomes a paean to what makes life itself good. Whether you have faced great loss or not, this book will change your life.
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The San Francisco Chronicle recommends Holding Silvan: A Brief Life by Monica Wesolowska
The San Francisco Chronicle recommends Holding Silvan: A Brief Life by Monica Wesolowska!
Monica Wesolowska’s Holding Silvan: A Brief Life review in the San Francisco Chronicle
While not for the faint of heart, Holding Silvan is a life-affirming story about the power and resilience of the human heart to survive even the most heartrending, unimaginable loss.
To read the...Forward
Monica Wesolowska in Pyschology Today: “After Loss, Courage: She was given the choice to let her newborn son live or die,” by Anneli Rufus in Stuck
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Bibliocracy tonight 8 PM - Monica Wesolowska on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California
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Finding the Love in the Story: An Interview with Monica Wesolowska, by Lena Lencek for NW Book Lovers
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Praise for Holding Silvan
This book clearly deals with a dark, difficult, and important subject. I can’t imagine anyone better equipped to do full justice to such a profound human experience.
- Michael Cunningham
- Author of By Nightfall and The Hours
We have never needed this book more.
- Erica Jong
- Author of Fear of Flying
I was swept away by this book. Heartfelt, heartbreaking and brave, it takes us on a fascinating ethical journey in prose that shines with Wesolowska’s love for her son. I feel fortunate for the experience, as if I have held Silvan myself. I’ll never forget it.
- Julia Scheeres
- Author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives
A tender, poignant and courageous narrative – insightful and beautifully written.
- Abraham Verghese
- Author of Cutting for Stone
When I picked up this book for the first time, my heart sank. I wondered if I could even bear to read such a sad story. And yet, within moments, I couldn’t put it down. I read long into the night, unable to leave the story until I reached its at once achingly tragic and profoundly life-affirming end. That the story of the death of a child is, in fact, life-affirming is a tribute to Monica Wesolowska’s graceful prose, her unflinching eye, and most of all her indomitable spirit. This book taught me more about a mother’s love than anything I have ever read before or since.
- Ayelet Waldman
- Author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
When someone writes about grief they also write about courage, since they survived to tell the story. The beauty and emotional integrity of Holding Silvan strikes me to the core. This book is brilliant.
- Lidia Yuknavitch
- Author of The Chronology of Water
Reader beware: Wesolowska will break your heart beautifully, and she has no intention of fixing it.
- B.J. Hollars
- The Los Angeles Review
Written in the present tense, the book is an achingly beautiful and honest chronicle, sure to incite mixed reactions. This isn’t a memoir aimed to comfort, but rather to reveal one family’s experience, and Wesolowska presents her story with grace…Sad, controversial and illuminating.
- Kirkus
In clear and transcendent prose, Wesolowska urges gratitude for life’s gifts even in the direst of circumstances. Wesolowska’s honest, elegant prose places Holding Silvan firmly in the company of Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Above all else Holding Silvan is a stunning meditation on love. “All [Silvan has] known in life is love…”
- this isn't about me
Only a writer with Wesolowska’s enormous talents could render her tale with such intelligence and grace, bracing honesty and even humor. In precise, luminous prose she chronicles an unbearable loss that nonetheless was filled with the joy she felt in being her son’s mother.
- Kate Tuttle
- The Boston Globe
Holding Silvan grabs you by the heart and won’t let go.
- Lena M. Lencek
- Reed Magazine
Monica Wesolowska has written a deeply moving, affecting memoir…This sensitively drawn portrait of motherhood and marriage explores the meaning of life, survival and letting go in powerful, emotive prose that transcends grief.
- Kathleen Gerard
- Shelf Awareness
Far from being a depressing book, Holding Silvan is one of those books you read and cry over and put down feeling that the human spirit is really indomitable
- Frances Dinkelspiel
- Berkeleyside
While not for the faint of heart, Holding Silvan is a life-affirming story about the power and resilience of the human heart to survive even the most heartrending, unimaginable loss.
- Zoe FitzGerald Carter
- The San Francisco Chronicle