In the Doorway by Linda Gravenson

“| have just finished reading your inspiring memoir.  I started it on Friday evening and couldn’t put it down.  You write with such energy and your way with language is pure delight—the metaphors you use, your analogies, your colloquialisms are spot on.   You take us through time and space and never lose focus—your desperately ambivalent relationship with your mother, the doorway—and all that it connotes—in which you have been so stuck.  You never lose your reader.  This reader.
You present and develop such complex characters and convey the depth and multifaceted nature of your relationships with them.  You fight against fear—in life and in writing.
I think that this memoir is an important addition to the canon of American/Jewish American/Jewish female American literature ….. but also to the clinical literature.  Your descriptions of your mother’s bipolar disorder/manic-depressive psychosis and your own agonized struggle with agoraphobia are astute, graphic, and heart-wrenching.  Variants of agoraphobia have played a role in my family – my mother and sister mainly, and myself to some degree.
Your descriptions of your psychotherapies and psychotherapists are also wonderful in their complexity.  No one has the full picture—perhaps too much to ask of any one individual.  Mallman (and other analytic types) have a corner on the dynamics of relationships (I say this aware that the analysts you saw were starched Freudian-bound MEN who had their own ideas about … well everything), and the CBT therapist gave you necessary tools to keep you moving—literally.  It seems that he was helpful in ways that he himself may not have fully appreciated, but that a non-dogmatic analyst (are there any?) could.  And, of course, there was your thyroid issue.  Oh, the power of unwell hormones.
Congratulations on a profound and wonderfully engaging work.”
        –Angelica Kaner, PhD psychologist and psychoanalyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale Medical School.

“Linda Gravenson writes an exquisite, searingly honest, and nuanced memoir, vivid in every scene, revealing the author’s inner life as she struggles to understand how she was caught in her mother’s madness, her father’s abandonment, and her husband’s secret. She is a master at describing internal conflict. Frozen in the doorway of her life, she simultaneously feels compelled and reluctant to act but must park fear and rage in the arresting symptom of agoraphobia. Each important player is complexly and empathically drawn. Gravenson shows their innate contradictions, their love, and their hatred, leaving her with the ache of longing for the goodness she knows is there but is offered only capriciously. It belongs in the cannon of great memoirs, equal in quality to those of Vivian Gornick, Mary Karr and James McBride.”
        –Joan Wexler, a retired clinical social worker and psychoanalyst on the  faculty of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven,  Connecticut, is the author of the memoir A Pot from Shards and the novel Make Me the Sky.

“We read literary storytelling for the possibility of encountering artistry that carries us, even through harrowing developments. In The Doorway delivers all that, a story with wrenching twists I won’t forget and a deft use of language I was sorry to leave.”
          –Charlene Spretnak, author of Relational Reality

“What a writer she is, how much wisdom she includes, how it was more acceptable to  be terrified than angry, stuff we take for granted now, but need to be reminded of. Not only is it her story, which is fascinating, scary, heartbreaking and triumphant, it’s the story of what happened to women back in the day when they were mad. Every sentence makes you read the next one, un-putdownable. I LOVE IT.”
            –Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life and Still Life at Eighty

Linda Gravenson was formerly a journalist and is now a writer and a developmental editor. The response to her personal essay in  the Ties column of the New York Times, “Not the Widow, Just the Ex-Wife,” inspired this memoir. She is co-editor of In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life after 50 (Simon & Schuster, 2010). She lives in Ojai, California.