Saved by LOVE - by Gloria Fern (Paperback)

About the Book

"I am a grandmother, a partner, a sister, a friend, a lover, a writer, a gardener, a walker, a reader, a mother. I look in the mirror and see my mother's eyes looking out at me."

Book Synopsis

"Sitting at my desk in Collingwood, watching the birds and blooms dance in the labyrinth, the long braids are long gone now, and my short hair is greying. I am a grandmother, a partner, a sister, a friend, a lover, a writer, a gardener, a walker, a reader, a mother. I look in the mirror and see my mother's dark brown eyes, surrounded by lifelines, looking out at me."

- Excerpt from Saved by Love: An incomplete memoir

gloria fern lives on the southern shores of Georgian Bay on what is now treaty 18 territory Ontario, Canada. Other books include Musings in a Pandemic and Beyond.

Review Quotes

Memoirs, as memoir-writers will say, are inordinately difficult to write. Gloria Kropf Nafziger in her 'incomplete memoir' articulates the breadth, the heights and the dips, alongside those 'middling-times', of a full, meaning-filled life. She manages to work through the conundrum of writing the ordinary as well as the extraordinary -- and does so with honesty, vulnerability and humour. She captures the joy, the ecstasy of life's moments with the rather meagre tools that words or images offer brilliantly. So too pain and drudgery, inextricably woven through each and every life as an essential element of the human condition, yet which can and generally does, surpass description, explanation and understanding. Saved by Love: An Incomplete Memoir is a brave and hopeful book, written by a daring, insightful and wise author who beckons her readers to join with her through her exploration of her life's labyrinth. She allows us to laugh, to weep, to question and to wonder. This memoir is an invitation to readers to lose themselves in a world that for many of us may seem vaguely familiar, yet at the same time, open all of us to novel ways of seeing the world -- both the inner and the outer -- simply because this is Gloria Kropf Nafziger's own, very personal story. It revolves around her connections to characters, those loved and those unlovely, but always infinitely fascinating. She beckons her readers to join her into new (or familiar) vistas of church and family -- in all their glory and their challenges -- as well as community, evolving or left behind. She sheds joy-filled and at times pain-filled light on notions of 'faith, hope and charity' through her poignant stories, memories and dreams; she tells of longing and belonging, hurting, forgiving and radically loving anew. This is a powerful, important book.

- DORIS R. JAKOBSH, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo