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Praise for Glad to Be Human
“Glad to Be Human takes a defibrillator to your creative center! It’s a field guide to embracing the creativity and spontaneity that bring joy to the business of being human. With an artist’s eye and a poet’s soul, Irene O’Garden shines her light on the bliss that surrounds us. Each of her essays turns the eye toward love and possibility. I am changed by these now dog-eared pages, and I will return to them again and again for inspiration.”
—Annabel Monaghan, author of The Digit series, columnist for The Week and HuffPost
“Glad to Be Human is a journey of joy. Irene O’Garden has crafted a collection of inspiring, illuminating and vibrant vignettes and reflections that delight and provoke at the same time. Her humor, artistry and love of life are infectious. Whether you read one story at a time or consume the book from cover to cover, you will find insights and phrases that will stay with you long after you put the book down.”
—Joanne Sandler, author, senior associate of Gender@Work, former deputy executive director for program and policy at the UN Development Fund for Women, producer and cohost of the podcast Two Old Bitches
“In a world that’s so challenging and complicated, it’s not always easy to remain optimistic. But it is possible. This book reminds us to hunt for light in the darkest places—and find beauty in everyday life.”
—Susan Hyatt, entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, bestselling author of BARE
“Reading Irene O’Garden’s Glad to Be Human: Adventures in Optimism is like spending a weekend with your best friend and talking non-stop about everything under the sun. Provided, of course, that you are lucky enough for this best friend to be as wise, witty, thoughtful, articulate, and expressive as Irene O’Garden. Written in an engaging and carefully crafted style that often shades lyrically into prose poetry, O’Garden’s essays cover a wide range of experiences, from love and loss, to laughter and living fully in each day. O’Garden explores the essence of what it means to be human with a clear-sightedness that acknowledges pain and suffering while remaining constantly open to wonder, hope, and joy.”
—Sheila Fisher, professor of English, Trinity College, author of Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation, Chaucer’s Poetical Alchemy, and other works
“What a joy to read this book! Irene O’Garden’s essays are wise and generous, bubbling over with startling and heartfelt insights about our lives and struggles. I kept pen and paper handy to record the many ideas that I want to think about again and again.”
—Rosalind Reisner, author of Jewish American Literature: A Guide to Reading Interests, editor and contributing author to Women in the Literary Landscape: A Centennial Publication of the Women’s National Book Association
“This is really a delightful book! Irene O’Garden takes everyday tasks and objects and turns them into fascinating insights. Glad to Be Human helped me look around in wonder and find my own delights. In addition to her brilliant text, I loved O’Garden’s black and white photos and alluring aphorisms.”
—June Cotner, author of Gratitude Prayers, Back to Joy, and thirty-four other books
“Get ready to devour the offerings at this table set by word weaver and poet Irene O’Garden. Sure, a feast for those who love metaphors, but a banquet, too, for those who prefer the real deal: Life is here for the taking. Love is here for the taking. So take it! This stunning collection of curiosities and illuminations (which I share with my writing students, who marvel at O’Garden’s attention to the tiny and ordinary charms in our midst) shows why being human warrants gladness, and with nods to the big and small (A saddleback caterpillar? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?), readers discover the brightest gift of all: gratitude.”
—Kathy Curto, author of Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood and faculty at Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and Montclair State University
Praise for Risking the Rapids
“ ‘Family is landscape,’ writes Irene O’Garden in her breathtaking memoir, Risking the Rapids. She gives us a bold dose of both as she embarks on a remote river trip to help make sense of a family wild and dangerous. In her brave eloquence, O’Garden adds a thoroughly welcome voice to the rich vein of American literature on the singular healing powers of wilderness.”
—Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, LA Times Book Prize winner and editor at Outside magazine
“Risking the Rapids is a deep and powerful memoir. Irene O’Garden sifts through her family’s shared pain (and shared joy!) with elegance and care—searching for nothing less than ultimate understanding and supreme forgiveness.”
—Martha Beck, sociologist, life coach, bestselling author, columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine
“Set aside a goodly few hours with O’Garden’s enthralling memoir and plunge into the lives of a family that has chosen you as their new member. Here they are on horseback, immersed in rivers, on tops of mountains—camping, sleeping, quarreling, and forgiving…Risking the Rapids embraces our being and never lets go.”
—Malachy McCourt, author of Ireland and A Monk Swimming
“It is a tricky business, navigating the river of forgiveness while honoring the injured self. In that wilderness the psyche must surrender to each boulder life smashes it against, and then stand in awe as we experience the changes wrought within our very DNA that are the gifts of facing down our demons; the gifts of looking our inner and outer truths square in the eye. O’Garden does this better than anyone I know and then puts it into words that have the cadence of angels.”
—Linda Ford Blaikie, CSW, psychotherapist and author of Godless Grace
“Irene O’Garden’s memoir is riveting, fiercely honest, and graced with poetic insight. An imaginative child plagued by insecurities, O’Garden vied with six siblings for her parents’ approval and lived beneath the Damocles sword of Catholic doctrine. Her chronicle of growing up in what seemed then a normal Midwestern family in the 1950s and ‘60s asks, ‘Who were we, really?’ in a far-ranging, haunting journey of discovery.”
—Victoria Riskin, former president of the Writers Guild of America, West, author of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir
“Irene O’Garden’s Risking the Rapids is, simply put, a literary triumph. Her roiling journey through the whitewater of big family turbulence is alternately a companionable sisterly punch in the shoulder and a vicious left hook to the jaw. And as is true for all superb writing, it is the ‘left hook’ that unexpectedly provides the narrator’s stunning—even transcendent—passage into calm waters and healing. Put aside whatever has gained your attention right now and read this book. O’Garden is truly a wonderful guide.”
—Steven Lewis, New York Times writer, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute teacher, author of Loving Violet
“Risking the Rapids artfully peels back the layers of family to reveal both the darkness and the diamond. O’Garden lyrically shares the challenging circumstances of her Midwest, Catholic childhood as a thread woven through a story of present-day danger during what is supposed to be a simple outing. The kaleidoscope effect of past and present, reflection and struggle bring the reader along on a powerful healing journey to bring what is hidden into the light.”
—HeatherAsh Amara, author of Warrior Goddess Training
“I haven’t experienced this kind of reverberating tension and utter fascination with a family since Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle. Irene
