Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery

Lazarre interweaves her experience of life-threatening illness with other stories of recent and past losses - most notably that of her mother to breast cancer when Jane was a small child. From these memories and experiences, Lazarre crafts a story that is at once intensely intimate and universally healing. As she contends with the pain and many indignities of her treatment for cancer, Lazarre realizes that successful medical treatment will only be part of her healing process. Her own illness becomes the vehicle for coming to terms with key moments of loss and grief - the death of a beloved therapist from breast cancer, her brother-in-law's death from AIDS, a traumatic disappointment in her work life, and the unresolved pain of being a motherless child. The gift of Lazarre's writing is her ability to transform her narratives of grief and loss into a story whose power to heal lies in its ability to penetrate the unconscious and give voice to the elusive truths hidden there. Through her writing, Lazarre is able to embrace grief - even her own inarticulate grief as a child - and find her way through the story to a restored sense of wholeness.