THE FUTURE TENSE OF JOY

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Nonfiction

Fusing of psyches

THE FUTURE TENSE OF JOY
By Jessica Teich
277 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

The Future Tense of Joy is an engaging account of author Jessica Teich’s long journey to emotional well being. She begins by describing her over-reaction to her eldest daughter’s bid for more personal freedom, how it brought up memories of herself at the same age. To a past, she writes, that would not stay put. At sixteen, Teich had been drawn into a secret and abusive relationship with a man at the dance studio where she took lessons. She never told anyone, and had never come to terms with what happened to her or the fact that her parents failed to protect her.

Early on, Teich introduces a woman she refers to as Lacey, a stranger she read about and whose life, according to the obituary, nearly paralleled her own. Both women were highly educated, both Rhodes scholars, and both appeared to have the world by the tail. The following excerpt sums up Teich’s feelings about the similarities between Lacey and herself, and provides a fine example of Teich’s moving prose.
Still, even when she had everything she wanted—especially then—she may have felt the accolades were built on a false brightness. Internal demons would prevail. And nothing could buoy her, not even the love of friends, their pain so palpable it was almost viscous. No success could root her in the “real world,” stabilize her. 
I knew what that was like, to exist in a liminal space, never quite fully situated. To be a person who feels too much, who feels she is not enough. Is that what Lacey felt? Yes, I was casting my shadow over hers, but something within our stories rhymed: the fear. The sense of isolation.
The book is a finely nuanced and studied look at a common thread that binds so many women together; the feeling that they are being punished for crimes committed against them. In Teich’s case, her self-esteem was so damaged that she didn’t know how to have a normal relationship with men. She expertly weaves her story through a mesh of characters and circumstance that combine to leave the impression of a novel. At the same time, it’s a book about Teich’s love of mothering and of mentoring mothers—her call to women to be proud of using a fine education for traditional causes.

She credits her interviews with members of Lacey’s family for helping her to see herself through a kinder lens (assisted, she admits, by a good therapist and Prozac). And for allowing her to open a conversation about the burden of expectation upon highly educated women. Teich’s compassionate view on Lacey’s life is as significant to this important memoir as is her own, a wise fusing of psyches that helped make her memoir truly unforgettable.


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