A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of the tarot brush up against life in a changing world.
The Tarot de Marseille is a 16th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.
Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.
Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness — and subtle beauty — of 21st-century life.
Praise for Things That Helped:
‘Things That Helped is a beautiful book — heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength.’
Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance
Praise for Things That Helped:
‘Jessica Friedmann has left safety behind and walked into something vast — a self, a world, on the verge of unravelling yet exhilarating and full of love. This book runs deep and wide. It’s alive with arresting images, with thoughts too big, sometimes too dangerous, to pin down.’
Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic
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Praise for Things That Helped:
‘Her transportive writing will break you open and fill you anew.’
Anna Spargo-Ryan, author of The Paper House
Praise for Things That Helped:
‘While the occasion for this book is Friedmann’s experience of post-partum depression, Things That Helped points to the larger question of becoming a writer-mother, and the ways a traumatic splitting of the self might relate to a creative one, and how, in consciously reintegrating aspects of self, a powerful, self-aware, and writerly subjectivity might emerge … There is an analogic intelligence at work, a sense of metaphor pushing behind each piece of the book, finding connections that weave each part of with others … There are skeins here, not a single narrative strand, and it is in their braiding that hopes of making and loving are recovered.’
Sydney Review of Books
