Johanna adorjan biography
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An Exclusive Love
It might seem odd that it took so long for me to read such a short book, but it was a difficult one to read. I was hesitant to write about it, but I decided to go ahead. Reading the book helped me to exorcise a few demons. Perhaps writing about it will let me let go of a few more.
The experience of reading Johanna Adorjan's memoir about her quest to understand the circumstances surrounding the suicide of her grandparents was a difficult one. The text is not difficult to read. The translation is beautiful.* It was hard for me to read because I have also lost two grandparents to suicide. Reading about her experiences talking with friends and family, trying to piece together what happened in those last days, was...familiar. I remember having those conversations. That was not what made it hard, howeve
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2012 Emerging Writers
Meet Johanna Adorján and Adam Schwartz,
winners of Moment’s annual Emerging
Writer awards celebrating up-and-coming
literary voices.
By Sala Levin | Nov 01, 2012
Fiction winner Adam Schwartz
Adam Schwartz and his novel, A Stranger On The Planet
Adam Schwartz is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Wellesley College whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. A Stranger on the Planet follows the life of Seth Shapiro from a mid-century New Jersey adolescence through his tumultuous adult life.
Q| What inspired the book?
A| After my mother read a draft, she replied, “I love the way you capture all my meshugas but humanize me at the same time.” Leave it to my mother to articulate my aesthetic principles so eloquently. The creative impulse is deeply humanistic, to create art that reminds us of what it means to be human. Creating that tension between a character’s meshugas and their humanity is what i
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Johanna Adorján: 'An Exclusive Love'
Not another family memoir written by a journalist, actor or celebrity. Another irreverent, navel-gazing biography, part of the flood of first-person tales of family life that include elegiac glorifications of personal neuroses.
Thankfully, when you open Johanna Adorján's memoir, such concerns disappear after only a few lines:
"On 13 October 1991 my grandparents killed themselves. It was a Sunday. Not really the ideal day of the week for suicide. On Sundays family members call each other, friends drop in to go walking their dogs with you. I'd have thought a Monday, for instance, much more suitable … I imagine that my grandmother was the first to wake that morning; I imagine her waking up, and her first thought is that this is the last morning she will ever wake up. She will never wake up again, and she will only go to sleep once more."
'An Exclusive Love' by Johanna Adorján
A journalistic investigation
Adorján's sober, almo