Episode 671 – Rachel Tzvia Back
About this episode
Rachel Tzvia Back discusses her memoir on high-functioning depression and its connections to Greek mythology.
Virtual Memories Show 671: Rachel Tzvia Back “Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that’s what depression feels like.” With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University Press), poet-translator-professor Rachel Tzvia Back explores her life with high-functioning depression, weaving Ancient Greek myth, poetry, family history, interviews, and more into an amazing tapestry of life in the dark forest. We talk about the challenge of structuring the arc-less nature of depression, the shame of not being completely debilitated by her illness, how the myth of Demeter and Persephone helped her translate and understand her experience as a mother and a daughter, what it means to be the mother who fails and why she included interviews with her adult children in the book, whether there’s a therapeutic aspect to writing a memoir like this, and how much of a departure this book was from her poet-roots. We also get into how she found herself in Greek and Roman myths in contrast to her orthodox Jewish upbringing, how she manages to bridge the…
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