Staff Pick: Katherine Dykstra

Hope Edelman’s memoir, The Possibility of Everything, out this week, wooed me completely. Edelman, who wrote Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, best sellers both, describes the fall of 2000, when as a new wife and mother she began to feel detached. This divide becomes epitomized by her three-year-old daughter Maya’s troublesome obsession with an imaginary friend. As Edelman focuses on Maya, attempting to repair the rift, she herself becomes obsessed. Recognizing this, her husband, Uzi, suggests they take a family vacation to Belize in order to let go the stress at home. While in Belize, Uzi, an optimist to Edelman’s admitted pessimist, urges her to step out of the box and bring Maya to a shaman. Edelman agrees, then changes her mind, then agrees again and round and round. Watching Edelman wrestle with her internal skeptic is both hilarious and resonant. And though in the end we might raise an eyebrow at the course of action she chooses, we understand completely her reasons for choosing so.

Bio: Katherine Dykstra is the nonfiction editor at Guernica. Her interview with Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Cracked, Not Shattered, appeared in Guernica’s August 2008 issue. Read her last recommendation here.