Sanctuary

“A celebration of love, and life . . . as well as an investigation of what it means to be human . . . Black’s voice is singularly lyrical, singularly bracing. She is obsessed with the potency of language, offering favorite phrases and lines, sometimes contextualizing but more often quoting with the confidence of a reader who has made the sentences her own.”—Alta

“A book of rare power and grace . . . Reading this extraordinarily thoughtful writer and her luminous prose was, for me, sanctuary.”—Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club

“Sanctuary opens up the space between life and death in order to show us how love gets born over and over again—a fierce and unflinching love, a love that has to travel trauma and truth to evolve. Emily Rapp Black’s book is a precise and complex articulation of a journey that has nothing to do with the puny hero’s journey. It’s bigger than that. It’s the story of the relationship between creation and decreation as it lives in the bodies of women. This book will give us better ways to tell the stories of motherhood, desire, despair, resistance, and resilience. This book will change lives.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children

“Sanctuary is an absolute marvel—gorgeous and bold, astonishing in insight and unsparing in candor. With aching vulnerability and compassion, Emily Rapp Black maps the topography of heartrending loss and erects upon it a refuge of otherworldly resilience. As a writer, a mother, and a woman, Rapp Black is a profound inspiration—not because she’s fearless but because she’s courageous.  To understand the distinction, read this beautiful book.”—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that ushers us to the very center of a profound truth that we don’t so much learn as recognize. Emily Rapp Black takes us there in Sanctuary, reminding us in achingly beautiful prose that pain and pleasure, grief and aliveness exist not apart but together in the dark matter, in the liminal space we occupy when we do what the living do: We love, we love, we love.”—Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance

“Not since When Breath Becomes Air has a memoir conveyed such profound loss alongside such luminous and life-affirming love. With exquisitely precise prose, Emily Rapp Black describes what it is like to mother a dead boy and an alive girl simultaneously: being pulled in both directions, juggling sorrow and guilt, but moving toward light and life. Sanctuary broke my heart and mended it, expanding it through truth and beauty.”—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game