Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

"Nola is really the biography of a family, by a writer who understands the complex inter-relationships between people who love each other helplessly. Robin Hemley investigates the shifting space that so often separates spiritual quest from insanity, divides a healthy search for the light from a dangerous staring at the sun. And finally, this is a writer's story, painful, edgy, honest, and humble before mysteries even the best observer and family archivist will never understand."--Rosellen Brown

"Robin Hemley has given us a haunting, strange, and beautifully luminous work in Nola, a portrait of the artist's quest for fulfillment complete with all its attendant sorrows and joys. Powerful, moving, genuinely gut-wrenching without losing its own sense of humor and pathos, Nola is one of the best works of nonfiction I have read in years."--Bret Lott

"An eloquent elegy to his sister (possibly a suicide and almost certainly a saint), Robin Hemley's Nola is the extraordinarily moving story of a rational man's education into mystery and magic." --David Shields