title: Bookbinder's Daughter: A Life Lost and Found
author:  Judith A. Fisher 
description: Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Judith Fisher's poignant memoir recounts her tumble into mental illness. Her struggle to reclaim herself is heroic and evocative. --Nona Smith, author, Stuffed: Emptying the Hoarder's Nestbr<br><br>Bookbinder's Daughter is brilliant. Judith Fisher's indomitable spirit keeps showing up to make sense of and then use adversity to stand tall and move forward from dysfunctional mother imprints, the horrors of electroshock therapy, and the repercussions of her attempted suicide. This book is a must read for anyone who needs to see how to turn despair into faith and transform dreams into reality. --Fred Mitouer, PhD, author, Wounds into Blessings; creator of Transformational BodyworkSM<br><br>Judith Fisher's memoir is scary and worrisome, but at the same time filled with both her incredible creative spirit and indomitable internal strength. She is a woman as ordinary as the rest of us, and as extraordinary as the true artist. She took the abuse the world dealt her and ripened it into compassion and a life of service and integrity. --Ida Rae Egli, editor, No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California 1848-1869<br><br>What does it take to find serenity after a childhood fraught with the rage of an emotionally fragile mother and an adolescence darkened by mental hospitals, rape, and suicidal despair? In vivid and moving vignettes, Judith Fisher takes the reader on an emotional journey from Cobleskill, New York, to her life as principal of a healing arts center on the Mendocino Coast. Along the way she has achieved another dream: to become a writer whose words bring light into the dark places where people hide their secrets from themselves and others and show them they are not alone-they too can survive and heal. --Maureen Eppstein, Executive Director, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference<br><br>A daring memoir that escorts the reader from love to terror and back again. Judith Fisher's story is a stunning journey into the delicate dynamics of a family in crisis. Yet Judith is tenacious, smart, and reflective the very qualities that enable humans to conquer their shadows and emerge into the light beyond. Readers who have struggled with their own demons (and haven't we all?) will find this book instructive and inspiring. --Linda Lambert, author of seven award-winning leadership books<br><br>Real lives are so much more interesting and inspirational than textbook clinical cases or even fictionalized characters, because you know the miracles really did happen. In Bookbinder's Daughter we see transformation happening as the memoir unfolds. Out of the darkest of times as an adolescent arises a radiant woman. --David Skibbins, PhD, author of the Tarot Mystery Series, Working Sober and Becoming a Life Coach<br><br>Bookbinder's Daughter is a brave, inspiring memoir, a tale of unrelenting resilience and redemption. Judith Fisher tells all her horrific experiences, seemingly impossible challenges, and sweet triumphs with stunning honesty. I love knowing her through this book, and feel so gifted by the beauty of her transformative life. --Katie Atherton, LCSW<br /><br />The beautifully visual and ethereal quality of the writing belies the intensity of the drama in this engaging memoir. It starts with snapshot vignettes of childhood, (much like memory), of the intense times; both the warmth and support of Grandma, and the emotional and physical demands of an ill parent whose needs are perceived in the family dynamic to be more urgent than those of her child's. This requires young Judy's needs to be constantly secondary, and sets up the tendency towards ineffective defense against strong or predatory behavior. She survives her teen years by retreating into a dissociative depression, which, coupled with parents inability to cope, lands her in a mental institution. An amazing string of betrayals and bad luck send Judy spinning like a windblown leaf through eddies of repeating traumas. After a near death experience, her depression is replaced by a strong will to live. Then begins the task growing into a purposeful adulthood.<br><br>In so many ways this is the story of baby boomer daughters who were caught in their teens or young adult lives attempting the emotional transition from childhood, with parents who had learned to deny their own emotions in the face of WWII. This spawned a generation of parents bereft of the emotional maturity to assist or even comprehend their children. For all the boomer daughters who were interred or bumped hard through this period of life, this is a must read, not only because of it s truth and honesty, but because of how Judith heals, as so many did, acknowledging the trinity of body, mind and spirit in the maturation of a healthy, whole adult. Judith triumphs in welcoming her inner child, grounds her adulthood in raising her own child, is drawn to helping others heal, and heals the bonds of relationship along with a partner who fully allows her, in her own time, autonomy over her own body; an essential base for having effective charge of one's life. --Kersten Tanner<br /><br /><i>Bookbinder&#39;s Daughter</i> is a brave, inspiring memoir, a tale of unrelenting resilience and redemption. Judith Fisher tells all&#151;her horrific experiences, seemingly impossible challenges, and sweet triumphs&#151;with stunning honesty. I love knowing her through this book, and feel so gifted by the beauty of her transformative life. --Katie Atherton, LCSW
zlib_text: THE LOST SISTERS
  
  Lindsey Hutchinson
  
  
  > [Start Reading](index_split_004.html#filepos9174)
  
  
  > [About this Book](index_split_001.html#filepos1522)
  
  
  > [About the Author](index_split_061.html#filepos804135)
  
  
  > [Table of Contents](index_split_002.html#filepos3141)
  
  
  [
  
  
  [www.ariafiction.com](http://www.ariafiction.com)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [About The Lost Sisters](index_split_002.html#filepos3315)
  
  > > > > ---  
    
  Orpha Buchanan and Peg Meriweather had a very different start in life. Orpha
  surrounded by wealth and riches, Peg dumped on a doorstep as a baby with
  nothing to her name but a scruffy blanket and tatty clothes. But one thing
  they had in common from their very first day, was a mother who despised them
  and wished them gone.
  
  Hortense Buchanan wasn’t made to be a mother. Bullied herself when she was a
  child, she continues the tradition with her own children, loving money and
  finery more than her own flesh and blood. When her daughter Orpha runs away
  from home, Hortense celebrates, never once