My new memoir, Breaking the Curse: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and Italian Witchcraft, is a story about being hurt by those you trusted, the failure to address that hurt by social, medical, and legal structures, and the finding of healing and hope in witchcraft. Sometimes magic heals us where human endeavors fail.
The books I read during the time I was writing this book range from memoir to guidebook to reference book. They talk about harms the authors have faced, they teach tarot, they bestow wisdom and honesty. It takes a whole library to make a book, and these books are just a fraction of what helped create my memoir, but each was deeply important to the process.
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This memoir describes Leftwich’s time in an abusive relationship, then as a single mom raising a child with a disability. Magic is woven throughout it, in freezer spells to keep her ex-husband away, to sigil-making, to protection spells. Leftwich teaches us that magic is something we can all access, that doesn’t need to be based around expensive rocks and costly ritual. Magic, in Leftwich’s world, is something that sustains us through our trials, focuses our desires, and channels our energies. In many ways, this book gave me the permission I needed to write my own magical memoir.
This is, in a lot of ways, another memoir of trauma and the saving power of the mystical. Washuta lives in haunted houses, has partners who abuse her, struggles through addiction, and denounces magic as a pure practice, but rather one we’re brought to by necessity. Washuta also delves into other topics here—Indigenous identity, the computer game Oregon Trail, living in a historic marker as a writer-in-residence. Washuta sees her doppleganger and travels through the Pacific Northwest in search of something that will heal her. In her own words, while searching for a purity in magic, “I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left…I am not a medicine woman or a healer. I am a person with an internet connection and a credit card I can use to buy candles and charmed oils to cast the kind of spell that might rip a little hole in the world.”
78 Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack
Rachel Pollack is probably best known as the first transgender woman to write comics, but she was also a brilliant thinker when it came to tarot, and has written several books on the subject. 78 Degrees of Wisdom is more a reference guide than anything else, and it taught me a great deal about the tarot, a practice which has become quite central to my life. In this book, Pollack goes through each card’s meaning, but also introduces the reader to cards which can provide gateways into the tarot through consideration and meditation. An absolutely essential book to anyone who wants to learn the 78 cards of the tarot. Pollack’s estate (she sadly died a few years ago) was kind enough to let me use some of the descriptions of tarot cards from this book in my memoir.
Around the Tarot in 78 Days by Marcus Katz
This book was the first book I picked up on tarot reading, and what much of my practice relies on. It provides a way to imagine yourself in the cards, and daily meditations on each card to help guide such a reading. This book, while it teaches meaning and numerology and symbols of tarot, also teaches that tarot can be intuitive and the practice of merging with your cards. If you want to pick up tarot in 2.5 months, and you’re ready for daily study, this is a great way to get started.
Glory Guitars by Gogo Germaine
Back to memoir, this book about wild teenage exploits in the late ‘90s by an author with synesthesia allowed me to open up my own experiences around sexual assault onto the page. While most of the book is about teenage adventure swirled with all the song and color of the author’s extraordinary mind, there is also a section about confronting a serial rapist in the author’s friend group, and women banding together to bring to light what he’d done to all of them. This book is a wild, ecstatic ride, and also a reckoning. Germaine’s ability to write the light and joy of youth alongside it’s darker parts was an inspiration to me.
This book is a bit legendary, and Yoko Ono is certainly one of my favorite artists. The book is a series of artistic prompts that often can’t actually be completed. In my own book, when I included a series of self-help prompts, some of which also can’t be completed, I thought of them as “what if Yoko Ono was your therapist?”
Italian Folk Magic by Mary-Grace Fahrun
It is quite easy for me to say that my book, Breaking the Curse, would not have been written without this book by Mary-Grace Fahrun. This book was my first introduction to the idea that there could be a magic that belonged to me, that wasn’t stolen from other sources, that I could claim as my own. I first encountered it while in a mental health crisis center, scrolling through Kindle for books that might help me make sense of my life. I immediately downloaded it and began reading it while I was in a fragile mental health state, and it spoke deeply to who I was as a person, and who my ancestors had been. Fahrun collected the wisdom of generations of her family, as well as other Italian-American families, in her blog Rue’s Kitchen Witchery for years to create this book. It goes through spells, rituals, superstitions, and recipes-as-magic to create a tapestry of wisdom for the Italian witches among us. It was a life-saver, and I will always be grateful for Fahrun’s work on this topic.
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well by James Allen Hall
James Allen Hall is a master storyteller, and much of this memoir-in-essays is light, funny, and inspiring. However, it’s was Hall’s very serious reckoning with his own rape that influenced me in the writing of my own memoir. Hall talks about rape that could easily be misinterpreted (as many misinterpreted the fact that I had been raped, due to the rapist being a former friend) in ways that delve into the act, the aftermath, and the tenuousness of such situations. Hall is also a brilliant poet, and runs the very gay and very funny Breaking Form Podcast.
Burn a Black Candle by Dee Norman
Another book on Italian Witchcraft, full of spells, saint worship, ancestor veneration, and more. This book deepened my knowledge of Italian folk tradition, and brought me closer to my ancestors, which was a huge part of my healing process described in my memoir.
Being Peace by Thich Naht Hanh
I’m not a Buddhist, but Buddhist practices of mindfulness and meditation have helped me enormously in my healing journey. This book by a Buddhist monk from Vietnam who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., is an excellent beginning for anyone who wants to understand how Buddhism can change their lives. My favorite part is when Hanh describes washing dishes as washing baby Buddhas, and how we should give dish washing the same attention we would such a blessed form. Hanh’s gentle introduction is an excellent place to start mindfulness meditation in your daily life.
