Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, follows Louise Rackoff as she meets Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. This sparks a decades-long journey of marriage, motherhood, and meaning. But when Louise is diagnosed with the same degenerative disease that claimed her mother, she makes the radical decision to disappear rather than put her family through her decline. What follows is a deeply moving exploration of grief, connection, and what it means to find beauty in the broken.
Drawing on personal experience and years of work exploring the social meaning of illness, a former educator, oral historian, and documentarian, she lives in Vermont, and her work has appeared in Slate, Bellevue Literary Review, and on NPR.
We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know her and the books that shaped her story.
Continue reading “My Reading Life: Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation Author Sarah Yahm is always inspired by Grace Paley”