Sailing My Shoe to Timbuktu: A Woman's Adventurous Search for Family, Spirit, and Love

by Joyce Thompson

In this fiercely candid and moving book, novelist Joyce Thompson recounts a difficult yet transforming period in her life. In words that will ring true to anyone in the "sandwich" generation, Thompson tells the story of her troubled marriage ending, her adjustment to single motherhood, finding new love, turning fifty, dealing with sick and dying parents, and somehow discovering a spiritual home in an ancient, earth-centered tradition.

Along...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060530634
• ISBN13: 9780060530631
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: HarperOne
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Great book for book club discussion

My book club read this book and we had the one of our most lively and interesting discussions. Joyce Thompson's candid story of dealing with her mother's mental decline and her family's history was both moving and funny. Thompson is a great storyteller. I didn't want the book to end. I wanted more details and more stories about her mother and father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, her children and husband. They all seemed to come alive as she tries to make sense of half told family lore. Thompson's neither sanctimonious nor condescending when she writes about the difficult journey she made with her mother. It's a great read.

This book is a gift.

This wonderful book overtook my life for 3 days as I savored each short, wise chapter. I was sorry when I reached the last page. A book about love, death, spirit, it is equally a funny down-to-earth account of a woman's everyday struggles with career, family and what to wear. Here's the bonus...Thompson's wordcraft is masterful. Her lovely meditation on the simple dance of a falling leaf is as lyrical as the passages about her working days at Microsoft are richly drawn. If you have an aged, impaired parent, you will find in Thompson a wise and witty guide on how to maneuver the tough, too-real moments. There is heartbreak here but also a sense of honor in helping a loved one transition into death. The vignette when she steals away from her abusive husband with her young children is told mostly though dialogue between her and her unsuspecting 6 year old daughter. A lovely and harrowing account where the mother protects the child but never quite tells a lie. Thompson's memoir challenges readers to find their own stories. The real treasure is her writing, an astonishing gift. If you're a fan of words, welcome to your new favorite writer, Joyce Thompson.

Something For Everyone?

This is a difficult book to catagorize. Do you wish the enjoyment of graceful prose by an author at the top of her game? Would you follow the highlights of a life story as memory works, with short chapters based on recurring themes but no straightforward timeline--interweaving people, events, family history, spiritual quest, finding a soul mate in middle age and making it work, raising children alone? There are poems written from the point of view of the author's aging mother (and they are good poems, a poet's poems, not the usual chopped prose of a fiction writer). There is humor in situations which were extremely difficult to live through. There is joy in introspection. There is personal growth after the achievement of success as a writer, sought after by movie producers. One might give this book to a friend for inspiration. One might accept the gently proffered challenges to try a different approach to attaining goals in life, and even rethink which goals really matter. Something for everyone? Perhaps.

A journey well taken

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a literary journey. Joyce Thompson is a master wordsmith. Each one of the 55 sections could stand alone. Each section has its own flavor that when combined with the whole makes for a delicious read.

Sailing Toward Self-Discovery

Sailing My Shoe to Timbuktu is one of the most touching and original works you're ever going to read. Part memoir by a well-educated urban woman, part spirit quest by the same sensitive soul, the book delves into difficult questions-the meaning of life, family, spirit-on the wings of clear, funny, sad, honest histories of herself and her family. The author's spiritual quest is decidedly non-traditional. Her skeptical though inquiring mind meanders toward belief in the life of the spirit as much because of the incongruous things that happen along the rough bumps of earthly life as by any religious philosophy or speculation. Sailing My Shoe is named for a game the author used to play with her uncle. As a child she would sail sticks, leaves-ultimately her tennis shoe-down a creek in search of far-off lands. In much the same way, the book sets off down the creek of memory in search of who this woman really is. To a reader who is the same age as her and who has had a similar experience with an aging parent, her accounts of dealing with her mother's last years are the most affecting. She does not gloss over the difficulty, nor is she too suave to celebrate the rare but brilliant sparks of love that occur with a mother who battles her frailties and sometimes her daughter with equal determination. One reads the "mother passages" wincing and laughing. The book flows through a lot of life's terrain, the rough as well as the smooth. Written with the delicate touch of a Japanese watercolor, Sailing My Shoe throughout is as joyful as a ride down a mountain cascade.