Non-fiction

A Music I No Longer Heard book cover.jpg

A Music I No Longer Heard:
The Early Death of a Parent

co-authored with Jan Johnson Drantell

Simon and Schuster, New York

Parents die. At any age, the loss of a parent marks a profound and often overlooked transition in life. When the parent leaves a young child to grow up without guidance, nurturing, goading, and love, the event becomes a landmark, a defining moment. When authors Leslie Simon and Jan Johnson Drantell learned of their common experience of losing a parent at a young age, they set out to discover the experiences and effects that unite those who have lived through this same signal event. "Every tragedy has its before and after", they write. "One day a child's life feels normal, the next it feels as if the world has torn apart."

What emerges from these stories is a moving portrait of the many and various ways that the death of a parent shapes one's life. A Music I No Longer Heard will be therapeutic for those who have lost a parent and will enable those who have not to understand the complex emotions that surround this all too common experience.

 

Praise

“A Music I No Longer Heard fills a serious gap in the literature on bereavement. The authors allow scores of survivors to describe their losses in their own words; all speak from the immediacy of experiences. Every reader will be able to find a kindred spirit who shares his or her own unique experience of loss.”
- Maxine Harris, author of The Loss that Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father

Reviews

“…[A Music I No Longer Heard] is an excellent resource for anyone who has lost a parent early or anyone attempting to understand someone who has. What makes this stand out is the broad range of stories that Drantell (Healing Hearts) and Simon (Collisions and Transformations: New and Selected Poems) have managed to incorporate—including their own.” - Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“…[A Music I No Longer Heard] should prove comforting and perhaps helpful to those who have lost, or are about to lose, a parent in childhood or adolescence, as well as to their immediate relatives.” - Kirkus Reviews

“…a heart-wrenching look into the helpless confusion that resulted for these people [who had lost parents] as children.” - Ross Werland, Chicago Tribune

“What emerges [in A Music I No Longer Heard] is a compassionate sharing of loss that does not wallow in sentiment and is courageous in its honesty.” - Paul McDonald, Louisville Eccentric Observer

Interview

Alix Madrigal interviews co-authors Jan Johnson Drantell & Leslie Simon in the San Francisco Chronicle

Essays

  • “A Play that Looks at Rape: A Crime against Women (and Men?) in 21st Century Sexualities: Contemporary Issues in Health, Education, and Rights (Routledge) 2007

  • “Mourning Becomes Protest(a): Women Making Space Public” Community College Humanities Review, 2004

  • “They Mine. Whose Mine? The African American Presence in the Literature of Gertrude Stein” in Fake-City Syndrome: American Cultural Essays (Red Hen Press) 2002