Comedian Shawn Hitchins (A Brief History of Oversharing) takes a turn toward the serious with The Light Streamed Beneath It: A Memoir of Grief and Celebration. Within five months, he loses two loves of his life to sudden death. This raw, probing memoir explores those loves, deaths and personalities, and Hitchins's journey back to life.
Matt is Hitchins's ex and still his best friend on the night of an unlikely accident; it is Hitchins, along with Matt's father, who must choose to turn off the machines. Hitchins had already been struggling with a painful breakup from a new, fairy-tale-perfect boyfriend, David, who had been the cause of much whirlwind travel and light. After losing Matt, Hitchins and David tentatively work their way back to togetherness: "This is where partnership begins for me," Hitchins speaks aloud to his lover, just hours before David will die by suicide.
These unspeakable losses could have broken him, but instead Hitchins goes to work: therapy, spirituality, yoga, therapeutic dance, courageous connections and reconnections with new and old friends. Through Día de los Muertos traditions, Dickens's A Christmas Carol and his (and Matt's and David's) chosen families, Hitchins develops a new understanding of his body, life and loves. "The time to learn about death is not just in the eye of a shitstorm of loss; death is also a conversation for still waters and blue skies." In sharing that conversation, Hitchins pursues self-knowledge, growth and healing in a vulnerable memoir for any reader who has experienced loss. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia