MORE PRAISE FOR BEAUTIFUL UNBROKEN:
“A luminous work of loss and healing.”
—Paul Austin, author of Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER
“Beautiful Unbroken is about the power of language as well as the power of compassion. But this memoir is above all an examination of a life, which is an examination of a conscience. And, after having traveled through the wilderness with Nealon, her readers may find themselves confronted with essential questions: What do we owe our fellow citizens, our society, our family, ourselves?”
—Jane Brox, Bakeless Prize Judge
WINNER OF THE 2010 BAKELESS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION, AN UNFLINCHING MEMOIR BY A WORKING NURSE
“Pay attention to [Mary Jane] Nealon—she’s a keeper. . . . I desperately wish skilled poets like Nealon wrote at least half of all memoirs. This is to be savored. There are mediations on life, death, leaving, returning, growing, healing; I will reread it.”—HLibrary Journal
As a child, Mary Jane Nealon dreams of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. By the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry.
Beautiful Unbroken details Nealon’s life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city’s first AIDS wards. In this compelling and revealing memoir, Nealon brings a poet’s sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death.
“Simultaneously an elegiac memoir and a sparkling prose-poem.”—HKirkus Reviews
“It is tempting to relax and allow the music of Nealon’s prose to carry one’s mind lightly over the gentle caress of her words and phrases . . . . But to do so would be to miss the raw power of her story. . . . This is no ordinary medical memoir about the grueling journey through school, midnight shifts on wards, and encounters with dying patients. It is a song to caregiving.”
—HBooklist
“With a seasoned nurse’s practicality and a poet’s skill with words, Nealon relates her escape from personal tragedy by treating patients near death. . . . Evocatively told, Nealon’s stirring story provides insight into the small acts that ease great pain.”—Publishers Weekly
AUGUST 2011, Memoir, 224 pages, 5½ x 8¼, $15.00
Paperback Original (978-1-55597-590-6)
