Memoir Book Review of The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman

by Matilda Butler on September 30, 2009

catnav-book-raves-active-3Post #20 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett

Review by Tracy Kauffman-Wood

Bestselling author and self-admitted skeptic Hope Edelman believes in the possibility of everything. She just needs visible proof. In her latest book, The Possibility of Everything, Hope chronicles her journey with husband and three year old daughter to the ruins of Mayan culture in Belize, and the reconstructive journey of her own spiritual worldview.


When her daughter, coincidentally named Maya, suffers recurring bouts of croup and develops a strange and frightening attachment to an aggressive, imaginary friend, Hope and her husband Uzi decide to take unconventional action. Frustrated by what western medicine has to offer their distressed child, they visit a Mayan shamanistic healer named Rosita Arvigo to treat Maya’s soul as well as her small body.

Fueled by Arvigo’s book, My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer (yes, literally a Maya healer,) Uzi believes this will help. While Hope, a skeptic who must see to believe, just hopes and looks forward to a little down time with the family.

While you can almost hear the cluck of grandmothers, “Who takes a three year old to Central America?” any mother can appreciate Hope’s desperate groping toward “anything, anything – to help her child.”

Transcendent, yet true to the life of a toddler’s mom, this journey toward healing begins on a road that reminds Hope of mango pudding and resolves while she is kneeling at the altar of her daughter’s evening bath.

If you are writing a memoir, I urge you to consider the vivid imagery and honesty of reflection in this book that allows the reader to travel the near and far reaches of the writer’s thinking, as she acknowledges her fears, suspends her disbelief and grows in faith.

“I watch Shakti head down the path to the dining hall, her tight, compact athlete’s body moving like a single, synchronized unit instead of a collection of arms and legs. Shakti walks with substance, with a ‘30s gangster swagger, like someone packing heat…Girls like her scared me in junior high. They still do.”


In Motherless Daughters, Hope’s well-researched bestselling first book, she tracked the experiences of girls living with the legacy of mother loss. In this book, more a straight-forward memoir than journalistic, non-fiction, Hope again tells her own story while her finger rests on the pulse of a universal human need – the search for meaning beyond the realm of the senses.

Just yesterday I read in the Sunday New York Times about a national movement in the US to consider patients’ cultural beliefs and values when deciding on medical treatment, especially among immigrant, refugee and ethnic-minority populations. It seems the immigrant Laotian population in California also believe in the value of treating the soul as well as the body. And hospitals in California are formally recognizing the cultural role of traditional healers such as the Hmong shamans.

As a writer and reader of memoir, and a former student of Hope’s at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, I recognize the desire to heal “mi vida” – my life – which fuels Hope’s books. I’m tutored by her visceral expressions of strong emotion, as when she wonders what advice her deceased mother might have given her on parenting. “The truth is, I don’t know, and sometimes this not knowing makes me feel so sad I can forget how to swallow.”

Following this line, I had to remember to breathe.

In this journey from hope to faith and gratitude, Hope Edelman has once again (like a good mother) anticipated the needs of our human family and gifted us with the richness and power of her first-hand experience.

[NOTE: If you would like to read Hope Edelman’s guest blog about her memoir writing experiences as well as her memoir writing prompt, CLICK HERE. If you missed the informative interview with Hope, CLICK HERE for the audio.]

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