Hawthorne Books

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California:  MONICA WESOLOWSKA. The personal and ethical challenges of making life and death decisions typically come at the end - for old people, adults - but in the story told by my guest this week, a mother is forced to decide when and how to allow her profoundly damaged newborn to die.  With alternately too much to guide her or, finally, too little, a loving and thoughtful woman – importantly, a writer - chooses to embrace fully the experience of this decision at every opportunity.  My guest this week is Monica Wesolowska, author of Holding Silvan:  A Brief Life.  In parts a personal memoir and a layperson’s guide to the complicated and confusing decision-making that all of us trust we’ll never have to face, Wesolowska shares with honesty and careful prose the bitterness, anger, hurt and joy of the short living and long dying of her baby boy Silvan.  There is her alienation from and then immersion in this process.  There is the theater of weird rules and variables, medical and legal.  There is learning the awkward language required to participate.  There is the fear of losing a marriage, relationships, all in the context of what she calls, ironically, loving her son to death.  Celebrated with an introduction by Erica Jong and incredible blurbs from an all-star lineup of writer fans,  long-time writer and teacher Monica Wesolowska has done, finally, what writers do with the material given them, as it were, and produced an instant classic on a topic she has turned into art and insight and elegant, generous, brave prose.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online or as a free download from the KPFK archives.

To listen to the show go to Bibliocracy Radio.