Leaping Past Zinnias: Madness, Murder, Marriage, and Me by Elizabeth Tingley

When Michael Laudor killed his pregnant fiancé, he didn’t just destroy himself and his beloved. He damaged the lives of everyone who loved him—including his brother, Richard and Richard’s soon to be wife, Liz Tingley. This book is her story. A psychoanalytically informed psychologist and child therapist, she tells how she met Richard and fell magically in love. Overnight, this transformed her sense of isolation, born of early childhood trauma and subsequent severe depression.  But when Michael killed Carrie three months before the wedding, a long unraveling of their happiness began.  Liz navigates this crisis for herself and her husband, whose mental health deteriorates to the point of no return. They divorce,  Struggling, Liz finds a way through, in her own therapy, in her work as a child therapist and with humor, courage and determination to not only survive, but thrive, on her own.

This eloquently written, authentically alive and utterly true work is like walking into a dreamscape of pain and haunting poetry. It is brilliant, strong and every page is meaningful, every scene  vibrant yet damning. It is written through the eyes of a most thoughtful child psychologist yet there is never a sense of being removed from each and every moment. This book must be read and will never leave you once it has, it will stay etched in your mind forever.–Steve Tuber, Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Psychology, City College of New York and author of Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in Clinical Context, Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2019.

This brilliant memoir by Liz Tingley is at once a story of childhood loss and abuse, of a heartbreaking and doomed marriage, of the catastrophe of schizophrenia, and of ultimate resilience and redemption.  After losing her beloved brother, Tingley is tormented by neighbor boys for years, too frightened and too afraid of loneliness to speak out.  While her intelligence, her curiosity, and her pluck ground her, she ultimately falls headlong into a relationship that will gut her, and bring her dangerously close to tragedy.  And yet she more than survives, and brings her pain and pathos to the work of helping others, finding her own clear and lyrical voice in the process.  I couldn’t put it down.–Arietta Slade, Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Child Psychology Yale Child Study Center Co-Director, Minding the Baby

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction and this gripping tale of a woman searching for love and companionship proves it. Liz Tingley weaves a fascinating tale of love turned upside-down and inside-out, as she unwittingly becomes part of a brilliant but troubled family, cursed with psychological and emotional problems, which ultimately results in murder.”–Charles Salzberg is a former magazine journalist and three-time Shamus Award nominated author, for Swann’s Last Song, Second Story Man, and Man on the Run.

Liz Tingley grew up in a small midwestern town, where she won statewide writing awards as a young person.  She has a B.A. in English from Oberlin College.  She migrated East after college and lived on there with a couple of minor detours, for forty years.  She has a M.S. in Infant and Parent Development from Bank Street College of Education. She worked as a teacher and director of the Harvard Law School Child Care Center early in her career.  She then obtained a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Boston University and held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Dallas, Bennington College and Bank Street College of Education.   She received her second doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the City University of New York CUNY.  She did her postdoctoral training at in the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR)  She was in private practice as a psychologist in New York City for many years and taught and supervised psychologists at   IPTAR, CUNY and Pace University.  She relocated to Illinois in 2017, where she practices as a clinical psychologist, directs the Child Diagnostic Clinic, acts as the chief psychologist, and supervises and teaches in the psychiatry residency program at Carle Health in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.  She returned so her dog Charley could have a big yard, and to fight Trump on the ground,