Bryn Mawr Memoirs
The Mawrtyr Memoir Book Club spotlights and discusses the works of Bryn Mawr alumni authors. To sign up, go to https://pecsenye.ck.page/mawrtyrmemoirbookclub.
Choosing Life
by Leslie Sussar '73
Discussion date: February 11, 2025 at 1 pm Eastern and 8:15 pm Eastern Time. Leslie will be on both calls.
In 1946, with the war over and Japan occupied, 2nd Lt. Herbert Sussan received a plum assignment. He would get to use his training as a cinematographer and join a Strategic Bombing Survey crew to record the results of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From his first arrival in Nagasaki, he knew that something completely novel and appalling had happened and that he had to preserve a record of the results, especially the ongoing suffering of those affected by the bomb (known as hibakusha) even months later.
When the U.S. government decided that the gruesome footage would not be of interest to the American public and therefore classified it top secret, he spent decades arguing for its release. His last wish was that his ashes be scattered at ground zero in Hiroshima.
The author, his daughter, followed his footsteps in 1987, met survivors he had filmed more than 40 years before. And found that she met there a father she never really knew in life.
This book recounts Herbert Sussan's experiences (drawn directly from an oral history he left behind), his daughter's quest to understand what he saw in Japan, and the stories of some of the survivors with whose lives both father and daughter intersected. This nuclear legacy captures the ripples of the atomic bombing down through decades and generations.
The braided tale brings human scale and understanding to the horrors of nuclear war and the ongoing need for healing and peacemaking.
Feral City
The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as "New York City's career elegist" (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class--and their controlling influence. "Plagues have a disinhibiting effect," Moss writes. "As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche."
In public spaces made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss experienced an uncanny time warp. Biking through deserted Manhattan, he encountered the hustlers, eccentrics, and renegades who had been pressed into silence and invisibility by an oppressive, normative gentrification, now reemerging to reclaim the city. For one wild year the streets belonged to wandering nudists and wheelie bikers, mystical vagabonds and performance artists working to disrupt the status quo, passionate activists protesting for Black lives--along with the everyday New Yorkers who had been pushed to the margins for too long. Participating in a historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity, from queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, Moss discovered an intoxicating freedom. Without "hyper-normal" people to constrain it, New York became more creative, connected, humane, and joyful than it had been in years.
Moss braids this captivating narrative with an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, weaving together insights from psychoanalysis, literature, and queer theory. A kaleidoscopic vision of a city transformed, Feral City offers valuable insight into the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and can be set free.
Never Simple: A Daughter's True Story of a Mother's Made-Up Life
by Liz Scheier '00
December 5, 2023 at 1 pm at 8:15 pm EST
This gripping and darkly funny memoir "is a testament to the undeniable, indestructible love between a mother and a daughter" (Isaac Mizrahi).
Liz Scheier's mother was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn't look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and--when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued her--a masterful liar. On an otherwise uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room and dropped two bombshells. First, that she had been married for most of the previous two decades to a man Liz had never heard of and, second, that the man she had claimed was Liz's dead father was entirely fictional. She'd made him up--his name, the stories, everything.
Those big lies were the start, but not the end; it had taken dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a fairy-tale, half-true life for the two of them. Judith Scheier's charm was more than matched by her eccentricity, and Liz had always known there was something wrong in their home. After all, other mothers didn't raise a child single-handedly with no visible source of income, or hide their children behind fake Social Security numbers, or host giant parties in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment only to throw raging tantrums when the door closed behind the guests.
Now, decades later, armed with clues to her father's identity--and as her mother's worsening dementia reveals truths she never intended to share--Liz attempts to uncover the real answers to the mysteries underpinning her childhood. Trying to construct a "normal" life out of decidedly abnormal roots, she navigates her own circuitous path to adulthood: a bizarre breakup, an unexpected romance, and the birth of her son and daughter. Along the way, Liz wrestles with questions of what we owe our parents even when they fail us, and of how to share her mother's hilarity, limitless love, and creativity with children--without passing down the trauma of her mental illness. Never Simpleis the story of enduring the legacy of a hard-to-love parent with compassion, humor, and, ultimately, self-preservation.