This or Something Better
A Memoir of Resilience
by Elisa Stancil Levine
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Pub Date Jun 07 2022 | Archive Date May 06 2022
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Description
When the Sonoma Complex fire came to Elisa Stancil Levine’s California doorstep in 2017, her world changed overnight. The devastating fire torched thousands of acres, but for Elisa, a world-class decorative artist, it was her reaction that night that cracked her wide open. A loving wife, mother, and grandmother, Elisa thought she had reckoned with her early childhood trauma. But when she fled the midnight firestorm without alerting a single neighbor, she had to ask herself: Who does that?
In This or Something Better, Elisa revisits her past and the one force in which she has always found true kinship: the wild river. Nature, her lifelong ally, gave solace. Through teen pregnancy, her baby’s stillbirth, and a mystical near-death experience at eighteen, nature shaped her character, and it later informed her wildly successful career. But was there an unintended consequence?
The fresh trauma of the firestorm sparked a quest: what treasure awaited if Elisa learned to trust human nature? Vivid, poetic, and intimate, This or Something Better reveals how true healing of deep wounds happens one exquisite layer at a time—and invites us each to consider and embrace our own path toward wholeness and authenticity.
In This or Something Better, Elisa revisits her past and the one force in which she has always found true kinship: the wild river. Nature, her lifelong ally, gave solace. Through teen pregnancy, her baby’s stillbirth, and a mystical near-death experience at eighteen, nature shaped her character, and it later informed her wildly successful career. But was there an unintended consequence?
The fresh trauma of the firestorm sparked a quest: what treasure awaited if Elisa learned to trust human nature? Vivid, poetic, and intimate, This or Something Better reveals how true healing of deep wounds happens one exquisite layer at a time—and invites us each to consider and embrace our own path toward wholeness and authenticity.
A Note From the Publisher
Author is available for interviews, blog tours, autographed tours, autographed book giveaways, contests, and book club discussions
Author is available for interviews, blog tours, autographed tours, autographed book giveaways, contests, and book club discussions
Advance Praise
"In this beautifully written memoir, Elisa Stancil Levine . . . explores the combination of surrender and decisive action, trust and wariness, solitude and human connection, intuition and painstaking self-inquiry, grace and sheer hard labor that lie at the heart of the great mystery of human resilience." ~Noelle Oxenhandler, author of The Wishing Year (Random House) and The Eros of Parenthood (St. Martin's Press.)
