"For years, I cried, not over my own losses, but at the movies. When bad things happened to me in real life, I didn't react. I seemed cool or indifferent. Yet in the dark and relative safety
of the movie theater, I would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's tragedy."
At age nine, Madelon Sprengnether watched her father drown in the Mississippi River. Her mother swallowed the family's grief whole and no one spoke of the tragedy thereafter. Only years later
did Sprengnether react, and in a most unlikely place: in the theater watching the film Pather Panchali, by Satyajit Ray.
In this fascinating memoir, Sprengnether looks at the sublime connections between happenings in the present, troubling events from the past, and the imagined world of movies. By examining the
films she had intense emotional reactions to throughout her adult life--House of Cards, Solaris, Fearless, The Cement Garden, Shadowlands, and
Blue--Sprengnether finds a way to work through her own losses, mistakes, and pain.