Barbara Lazear Ascher

Barbara Lazear Ascher is a former attorney and the author of four books of non-fiction, Playing After Dark (Doubleday), The Habit of Loving (Random House), Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief (Viking Penguin), and most recently, Dancing in the Dark: Romance, Yearning, and the Search for the Sublime (Harper Collins). She has been a columnist for The New York Times and Elle Magazine, a Contributing Editor at Self Magazine, book reviewer for The Washington Post Book World, NPR essayist, and contributor to The Yale Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Gourmet, Vogue, Modern Maturity, and numerous other national journals.

Landscape Without Gravity
Penguin Books, 1993 (PhP 80.00)
In July 1989 Barbara Lazear Ascher learned that her brother, Bobby, had died of AIDS at the age of thirty-one. With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. this extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that "landscape without gravity." Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another--a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a mapfor that "hero's journey" we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone--especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.