Mirror Mirror : A Collection of Memoirs and Stories

Mirror Mirror A Collection of Memoirs and Stories, Stephanie Hart’s third book, is composed of a series of fast-paced vignettes that explore her childhood, youth, family, and ancestral background through a mix of real and imagined memories and events. She recounts and interprets the unique details of her own life, bringing to life the personalities and experiences of various relatives and friends in an intimate, heartbreaking, and often humorous manner. Her rich prose is evocative and poetic, yet highly accessible and engaging. Her story becomes a window into many lives, lives most readers will find reflected in their own personal narratives, encouraging them to revisit and re-imagine their own family backgrounds. Seamlessly blending past and present, Stephanie takes us from Manhattan of the 1950s to Moscow and Odessa circa 1800s, where she imaginatively renders the lives of her grandparents and great grandparents, and then takes us into the twenty-first century. She bares her soul by inviting readers into her world: her magical and unsettling early childhood by the sea, her years spent as the only Jewish girl in a Presbyterian boarding school, her urban high school years during which conflict with her mercurial and charismatic mother reaches a crescendo, and the weight of her father’s anger and unrealized dreams press down upon her. While acknowledging the mirror of the past, she shows us the love and friendship reflected in her current life, celebrating the generative power of each moment to transform experience. Mirror Mirror is beautifully enhanced with well-preserved photographs of Stephanie Hart’s family. These expressive images allow us to experience the climate of other times and places as if we had been there ourselves.