A richly twined, multi-generational memoir that explores the complexity of family, the hidden forces of mental illness and trauma, and our struggle as human beings to help the people we love without losing ourselves.
Stay: A Story of Family, Love & Other Traumas opens in the spring of 2016, days before Julie Fingersh's fiftieth birthday as she chugs up a Northern California trail with her running partner Lucy, struggling to confess the hideous truth. She is plagued with feelings of envy toward her own daughter, eighteen-year-old Jesse, whose life and future are headed for the stars. Earlier that day, Jesse had burst into the kitchen to announce that she'd been the only campaign intern selected to help staff Hillary Clinton's Bay Area visit. Julie's initial swell of pride was swept away by a surge of shame-filled envy. Suddenly she was overcome by her own stalled future, that had been set in motion by her family's doomed odyssey to save her brother from his descent into mental illness thirty years earlier. The hidden trauma of the past had come home to roost.
Unfolding over the course of five decades, Stay's tells the tale of Julie's effort to recover her own buried dreams--only for her daughter's life to be derailed by the presentation of a debilitating chronic medical illness during her first week of college. The book's backstory follows the devastating arc of Danny's life, as he transformed from Julie's sunny, funny childhood playmate into a haunted stranger, setting in motion a secret, fourteen-year family crisis that, as sister and daughter, recast her identity and future.
A story that gives insight and hope at a time when every sector of our society is grappling with the ripple effect of mental illness, the lonely plight of chronic medical illness, and the often invisible cost of our past, Stay is captivating journey into the complex layers of modern life: mystical, messy, funny, and sometimes heart wrenching. It's a story for everyone who is on a search for happiness and meaning. Above all, Stay is about the universal human quest to embrace the oldest, most important search of all: how to rise to the possibility of our own lives.
