Aural History book cover
Biography · 2020 · English

Aural History

by Gila Ashtor

About this book

Gila Ashtor uses experimental memoir to follow grief, loss and the difficult process of understanding one’s own experience. The narrative moves through three stages, changing its style as its central figure’s relationship to trauma develops.

The first section follows a girl whose father dies when she is twelve, leaving her with responsibilities in the family bakery and at home. Later sections move through school and adult life, including a period in New York and encounters with psychotherapists. The changing forms of narration explore the distance between outward competence and feelings that remain hard to recognize or express.