The Beautiful Agonies is a luminous, genre-bending work of literary nonfiction that braids intimate memoir, lyric essay, Buddhism, and anthropological insight into a meditation on aging, maternal caregiving, dying, and the beauty of the natural world. With fierce tenderness, Kusserow chronicles her mother’s final year of life in rural Vermont—days shaped by stark comedy and bodily decline, loneliness and fear, a scrappy, dogged search for meaning, and the intense beauty of the Vermont landscape. Kusserow’s trained anthropological lens, alert to stigma, cultural scripts, and the performance of “good aging,” sits alongside a tender daughter’s heart, creating a poetic, nuanced narrative that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally shattering. Kusserow’s poetic and culturally perceptive voice—by turns wry, furious, reverent, and quietly funny—refuses sentimentality while still delivering catharsis. The Beautiful Agonies offers readers an extraordinary intersection of humanities and health, ethics and embodied emotion, cultural critique and spiritual inquiry, and a mother and daughter’s shared love of the natural world, a work as philosophically searching as it is heartbreakingly human.

The Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.