ABOUT THIS BOOK

An honest account of depression from poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler.

Lights in Cold Rooms shares Joan Cusack Handler’s personal experiences with depression as a licensed psychologist with forty years of experience treating patients. For many, including Handler, quarantine precluded the preferred treatment of psychotherapy. Handler turned to her own pathology to teach herself and others how to navigate both isolation and depression. Feelings of anxiousness and impending mortality intensified as she faced the death of her older sister and grappled with the guilt that erupted when she learned that an in-person memorial service was impossible. Opening both her personal history and pathology to public view, Handler chronicles her confrontation with eighty years of family dynamics and explores the path she took to return to a place of hope.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has published three verse memoirs—GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans, and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded twenty-five years ago, and where she continues to serve as publisher.

REVIEWS

As an account of a woman grappling with depression, this book is compelling in its unflinching honesty. It is, however, more than that. Joan Handler delves into the tangle of a mother and two daughters and how the wages of love and loss, of compassion and alienation play out over the course of a lifetime and how a degree of wisdom is possible for someone who is willing to look deep and hard. Being balanced about our suffering is one of the great challenges in this world. Joan Handler meets that challenge with grace in this book.

—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel

In the splendidly candid Lights in Cold Rooms, with courage as her method and writing as her tool, poet and psychotherapist Joan Cusack Handler creates a memoir of the unconscious life. Handler faced a crisis in her own mental health as she aged, and as a palliative she undertook a review of her family relationships, shining a therapist’s light, with a poet’s metaphors, into the cold rooms of the past. At the age of ten, she was almost six feet tall, and Handler’s spine has affected her physical and emotional health for eight decades. This book, “the homework of therapy,” as she calls it, has spine. Here is a record of a woman’s aging and depression as well as her vigorous willingness to examine life with spirit and gratitude. Joan Cusack Handler’s rich insights make Lights in Cold Rooms a book for all of us as we accumulate the layers of our years.

—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Depression & the Stories That Came with It

Patient Clinician

I. The Body, the Culprit
The Worst Day
Looming
Morphing
Twisted, Tilted
Homes
Tall Falls
Greedy
Lazy
Love Affair
Fractured
A Kindness
Fantasy

II. Heart Sick
The Heart Thing
The Falling
Pink Cheeks, Soft Silver Hair

8

On the First Night of Enforced Quarantine
Complicit
Unthinkable
Chained
Peace Be With You
All That Mattered
Regrets
Bereft

III. A House Divided Against Itself
Close Watch
Dark House
Selfish
Siblings
Another Look
Brothers Escape
Resentment Deepens, Guilt Festers
Peace, Finally
Still
No Room at the Inn

IV. Banquets & Cameos
Sustenance
The Crown
Reprieves
Integrity & Love in Abundance
Transfixed
Then the Poems Came

9

Finding Balance
Nesting
When Does the Gratitude Start?
Another Good Mother
Orchids in Tall Vases
It’s Still Not Safe to Return to Brooklyn

V. Keep Them Close
Privileged
Back to Square One
Silence
Another Fissure
X-Rays & Scans, Past & Present
Possessed
Preordained
When the Water Is There
Self-Parenting
A Birthday Picnic
As Long as There’s a Needle Holding On

Coda