The Still Point of the Turning World

Emily Rapp

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
With a new chapter detailing the events that have taken place since Ronan's passing in February 2013.

Like all mothers Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her son Ronan. He would be smart loyal physically fearless level-headed but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education.

But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months. Rapp and her husband were forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about raising a family. They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment; to find happiness in the midst of sorrow; to parent without a future.

The Still Point of the Turning World is the story of a mother's journey through grief and beyond it. Rapp's response to her son's diagnosis was a belief that she needed to 'make my world big' - to make sense of her family's situation through art literature philosophy theology and myth. Drawing on a broad range of thinkers and writers from C.S. Lewis to Sylvia Plath Hegel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Rapp learns what wisdom there is to be gained from parenting a terminally ill child. In luminous exquisitely moving prose she re-examines our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a good parent to be a success and to live a meaningful life.

Emily Rapp Black's follow up memoir Sanctuary will publish in January 2021.

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