This month we’re reading The Trapeze Diaries by Marie Carter (Hanging Loose). Some people visit shrinks to get to the bottom of things—Marie Carter climbs a ladder, wraps her hands around a bar, and pushes off.

Marie Carter: If you have told me five years ago that I would be an avid student of trapeze and learning all kinds of crazy tricks like foot hangs, ankle hangs and one-knee hangs, that I’d become obsessed with yoga and standing on my head and doing handstands on a daily basis I would have told you to go back to drinking your moonshine. Five years ago I was a couch potato/bookworm with no interest in going to the gym or taking up sports. In high school I was the physical dunce, the last person you would pick for your team. I was also terrified of heights. Nonetheless I was fascinated by circus artists and would find myself crying every time I watched trapeze artists perform and when I finally took a chance and went to my first trapeze lesson, in spite of the humiliation and the difficulties of learning trapeze, I fell madly in love.

But it wasn’t just my physical form that trapeze changed. By confronting the physical specter of fear I began to confront emotional fears that I’d been harboring all my life. The Trapeze Diaries is a book based on my experiences of learning the trapeze and the personal transformation that took place.

“Marie Carter’s The Trapeze Diaries is a tour de force performance —this is a writer transforming the things of daily life, the fears and struggles and unexpected glories, into weightless prose. Carter gets at the question we’re all trying to get at in one way or another: how, in this heavy world, against our own mortality and terror, can we break loose and fly? How can we get around the troubles in our own hearts and make our way toward joy? Carter finds the answer, both metaphorically and physically.”
— Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Year of Yes

“Not only the lyrical tale of one woman’s love affair with the trapeze, but a powerful story on becoming brave and letting go.”
— Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village

“A quiet meditation on loss and recovery…the narrator’s poignant voice has great clarity as she explores a new life far away from home while recovering from the death of her father. This is a brave and heartwarming book.”
—Donald Breckenridge, author of 6/2/95 and fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail