Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness Paperback - 2013 - 1st Edition

From the rear cover

"Nola"
""Nola" is really the biography of a family, by a writer who understands the complex inter-relationships between people who love each other helplessly. Robin Hemley investigates the shifting space that so often separates spiritual quest from insanity, divides a healthy search for the light from a dangerous staring at the sun. And finally, this is a writer's story, painful, edgy, honest, and humble before mysteries even the best observer and family archivist will never understand."--Rosellen Brown
"Robin Hemley has given us a haunting, strange, and beautifully luminous work in "Nola," a portrait of the artist's quest for fulfillment complete with all its attendant sorrows and joys. Powerful, moving, genuinely gut-wrenching without losing its own sense of humor and pathos, "Nola" is one of the best works of nonfiction I have read in years."--Bret Lott
"An eloquent elegy to his sister (possibly a suicide and almost certainly a saint), Robin Hemley's "Nola" is the extraordinarily moving story of a rational man's education into mystery and magic." --David Shields

From the jacket flap

The evidence at hand: an autobiography-- complete with their mother's edits-- written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published as fiction; perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. But Hemley, hampered by a "larcenous heart" that covets his sister's story for himself, discovers that finding the truth in any life-- even one's own-- is a fragmented and complex task.
"Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness" is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for God. It is also a look at what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and the sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator.
Robin Hemley is the author of several works of nonfiction and fiction, including "Turning Life into Fiction," "The Last Studebaker," "All You Can Eat," and "The Big Ear." His work has also been published in Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, and has been heard on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and "The Sound of Writing." His awards include first prize in the Nelson Algren Award competition from "The Chicago Tribune," two Pushcart Prizes, and The George Garrett Award. Hemley presently teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.