A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of the tarot brush up against life in a changing world.
The Tarot de Marseille is a 16th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.
Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann's life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.
Twenty-Two Impressions- notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness - and subtle beauty - of 21st-century life.
Praise for Things That Helped- 'Things That Helped is a beautiful book - heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength.' -Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance
Praise for Things That Helped- ' A n extraordinary account of extreme postnatal depression, as seen from the eye of the storm.' -Viv Groskop, The Guardian
Praise for Things That Helped- 'While the occasion for this book is Friedmann's experience of post-partum depression, Things That Helped points to the larger question of becoming a writer-mother, and the ways a traumatic splitting of the self might relate to a creative one, and how, in consciously reintegrating aspects of self, a powerful, self-aware and writerly subjectivity might emerge ... There is an analogic intelligence at work, a sense of metaphor pushing behind each piece of the book, finding connections that weave each part of with others ... There are skeins here, not a single narrative strand, and it is in their braiding that hopes of making and loving are recovered.' -Sydney Review of Books
