Introducing Say Mother Say Hand
We open our eyes & come home to an exquisite coda of love complex & real. The Half Mystic team is so deeply honoured to announce our latest book & debut memoir: Marie Conlan’s Say Mother Say Hand, lingering in endings by unravelling beginnings, is open for preorder today.
Say Mother Say Hand begins in the wake of an attempted suicide. Nestled somewhere on the spectrum between memoir & dreamscape, the narrator rummages through her maternal lineage & unravels the threads of intergenerational trauma—of the Holocaust, of mental illness, addiction, suicide, what it means to bear witness to what she cannot heal. As these threads spiral into a reckoning with inheritance, the narrator dreams open the unfindable parts. In this stunning debut, Marie Conlan interrogates what is inherited through the body, what connects a lineage, & what is destined to come next in the brutal & uncertain now.
David Welch, author of Everyone Who is Dead & recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, & the Sewanee Writers' Conference, wrote of this incredible book: “Marie Conlan traces a lineage throughout Say Mother Say Hand, moving from allusions to the Seven Mothers of the World to the serpentine nuances of personal history. Through this debut she pioneers that lineage of examination, empathy, and experimentation-as- exploration. In Conlan’s words, the traditions we turn and return to as we celebrate love and comfort ourselves through loss pupate and swell to be seen through a grippingly original lens. Here is a book of generations, of knuckles and lace, of treasures and ‘remnants from an unknown sea.’ Here are pages that are lovingly alive, filled with marrow.”
Sara Veglahn, author of The Mayflies & The Ladies, commented: “Every family has a storyteller—one who takes note, digs deep, and attempts to make sense of the past. In this incredibly inventive and highly personal exploration of family, history, and trauma, Marie Conlan offers us ways to move beyond pain by taking the past and transforming it into ‘something sweet to chew on, a salve, a story.’ She reminds us that while we might not be able to escape our lineage, ‘there’s nothing to inherit,’ and we have the power within us to make our own narratives, our own futures. Her incantatory language functions like a spell that moves to cast out the ways in which history tends to repeat itself. In the end, we are reminded that the cure for everything is always love.”
Said Karolina Zapal, author of Notes for Mid-Birth & Polalka: “In Conlan’s memoir, we stand with her at the altar as she vows to her ancestors not even death do us part. Death and its close calls are what guide her (and us) through a hagiography of people who may or may not be worthy of being seen as heroes, heroines, friends, and shadows through the innocent, questioning eyes of a child, and the troubled, interrogative eyes of that child as an adult—eyes that are simultaneously passive receiver and active perceiver. Conlan writes, ‘I begin to think if I have a little girl, I will name her after what you could have been’, inviting her family lineage to keep dreaming, repeating, stuttering, and ‘looking for proof ’ of lives lived and yet to be lived. It is hard to know in this book who is sick and who is not, the sick and the healthy set against the backdrop of needy children, of needing children. What Conlan needs is to clear space within her body, one that is occupied by family, to make room for a lover who shows up like a lightning storm, causing steam to rise: ‘if I could just fit his bones into my body.’ At the same time, she needs to keep her family close because without them, she could not survive: ‘make her stay in our bones.’ Conlan catechizes these needs, breaks them apart, and puts them together again, satisfied or not, writing vibrant and brilliantly crafted scenes cut from memory, excised from her skin.”
Say Mother Say Hand comes out on April 20, 2020. You can preorder our debut memoir right here. Please also subscribe to Half Mystic’s newsletter to be updated on promotional goodies for the book in the days leading up to the launch—including interviews by Marie with the HM team, guest posts on the process of bringing this deeply personal creation to life, reviews by journalists & bloggers across the Internet, notification of the details of the in-person promotional launch, & more!
As always, journalists, editors, bloggers, & podcasters interested in participating in the blog tour for Say Mother Say Hand or otherwise covering the book should get in touch with us. We want to bring this prayer of light to your readers, & we think you’ll love this gorgeous, incisive thing as much as we do.
Darling songbirds, Say Mother Say Hand puts forth a song unfathomably necessary & unique, from a voice that rings at once as a love letter & a reckoning. It is a personification of the word despite: survival despite, forgiveness despite, love despite. This book speaks & all at once we can’t help but pay attention. We think you’ll feel the same way.