Burned: A Memoir
Burned: A Memoir
Published April 2010
Teaching Trauma & the Arts at CCSF.
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Atlas Upstairs Blog:
"Discussion with Louise Nayer on her forthcoming memoir, Burned"
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April 2010 Issue
Reading Room Section
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June 2010
Appearing:
- KNEWS Conversations
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August 2010
Appearing at:
- Glen Park Library, San Francisco
- Lupin Lodge Book Club, Los Gatos
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October 2010
Appearing at:
- Lyon Books, Chico
- Notre Dame De Namur Univ, Belmont
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November 2010
Appearing at:
- Southern Regional Burn Conference in TN
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BUY A COPY!
How to Bury a Goldfish
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Introduction
Louise Nayer is an internationally published poet and writer who has read her work on radio, at universities, and at coffee houses and bookstores throughout the United States. She has published four books, and her poetry and writing have appeared in over forty magazines.
A deeply moving, beautifully written, and transforming story of how one family lived through unbearable tragedy and separation while finding the love and courage to journey back to life.
Your parents were extraordinary people. It seems a miracle that they could have a reasonably normal and content life after that tragedy.
Burned: A Memoir - Brief Description
On July 22nd, 1954, at four years old, Louise Nayer woke to find her world shattered. Her parents, Hank and Dorothy Nayer, a New York City physician and nurse, were on their first family vacation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. After dinner and a play, they climbed down a rickety ladder to the basement to light the pilot light that had gone out. After the match struck, they were engulfed in flames while Louise, her sister, Anne, and babysitter slept upstairs. Dorothy Nayer suffered third degree burns mostly on her face and hands. She would live her life as a disfigured woman. Hank Nayer was severely burned as well. For the next nine months she and her sister lived with their uncle, aunt and two cousins on a farm in upstate New York where they played in the fields and later built forts among snowdrifts. Connected to each other only by the telephone, her parents tried to make their daughters believe they were still alive and would come for them. Though her mother bore 37 surgeries, and her father suffered severe burns and from a paralyzing depression, the family reunited in New York City amidst horror and love. This book chronicles the nightmare of the explosion, the nine months of separation and the final reconstruction not only of Louise's mother's face and her father's soul, but of the family itself. Haunted by panic attacks as an adult, Louise knew she had to write the story of the explosion.
photo by Jarda Brych, shindigphotography.com