From Seed to Tree to Fruit: A Daughter’s Memoir of Grief and Healing
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From Seed to Tree to Fruit: A Daughter’s Memoir of Grief and Healing
by Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk
For young Becky Williams, a transplanted Northerner living in the segregated South of the 1950s, childhood was cut short when her father, a researcher at Oak Ridge and a beloved biology professor at the University of Alabama, suffered a psychotic break. He died three months later at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental institution. In this heartfelt memoir, Mlynarczyk searches through family scrapbooks, old letters, and her own childhood memories in a quest to understand her father’s mental illness and sudden death. Readers who revisit the past alongside her will see what can be gained by looking back on our loved ones in all their complexity. If we are fortunate, we experience healing as we learn to love them in new and unexpected ways.
“This remembrance is a poignant love letter to the father Mlynarczyk has spent a lifetime grieving.” — Kirkus
“Haunted by her father’s psychic crisis and his early and unexpected death, Mlynarczyk brings us on a poignant journey, exploring her father’s violent breakdown and coming to terms with a past weighted with fear and silence.” — Julia Miele Rodas, author of Autistic Disturbances
“This memoir exemplifies the healing power of writing as a path through pain.” — Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir
“From Seed to Tree to Fruit does what good memoirs must do: explain the present by helping us to understand the past.” — Wendy Ryden, co-author of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness
