Lights in Cold Rooms: A Psychologist Reflects on Family, Aging, Love & Loss

Coming September 2nd
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During Covid, depression increased exponentially among aging women. For many, including Joan Cusack Handler, quarantine precluded the preferred treatment of psychotherapy. As a licensed psychologist with forty years’ experience treating patients, Handler turned to her own pathology to teach herself and others how to survive emotionally. Anxiety and a sense of impending mortality intensified as she faced the death of her older sister and the guilt that erupted when she learned that no memorial service was possible. Lights in Cold Rooms chronicles Handler’s confrontation with 80 years of complex family dynamics and often difficult love, and explores the path she took to work through depression and ultimately return to wellness. 

Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has published three verse memoirs—GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans— and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first 100 books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded in 2000 and continues to serve as publisher. Her poems are widely published and have received awards from Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. She is also the author of the PsychologyToday.com series, “Of Art and Science.”

Because I had recently retired from my psychotherapy practice, the quarantine did not affect me professionally, but it did personally. I was among the many thousands of women battling my mental health. I recognized early on that I was slipping into a depression that no longer responded to my antidepressant medication. While confronting any mental or physical illness is frightening, depression’s paralyzing nature strips us of hope—the dive into despondence all-consuming. Unable to find a therapist for myself, I was forced to monitor the illness on my own. As a psychologist with a forty-year practice, I understood what was happening to me, and I was terrified.

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Off Mom and I would go, first to Bloomingdale’s at 59th Street, then to Macy’s at 34th. We spent many Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons shopping the racks.

When the traffic on the floor thinned out, the sales ladies would get involved, offering opinions, and we’d have a fashion show. As I tried on coats, skirts, and dresses, I twisted and swirled for them just as Loretta Young did on her TV show. I fell in love with how I looked. I adored the brightness that lit Mom’s eyes and her smile as she admired me in each new outfit.

Her familiar darkness gave way to pride. “Oh, Joanie, you look so beautiful! Nobody wears clothes like you.”

With my mother and the sales ladies in a circle around me, I believed I was beautiful.

With courage as her method and writing as her tool, poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler creates a memoir of the unconscious life in the splendidly candid Lights in Cold Rooms. Handler faced a crisis in her own mental health as she aged, and as a palliative she undertook a review of her family relationships, shining a therapist’s light, with a poet’s metaphors, into the cold rooms of the past. This book, “the homework of therapy,” as she calls it, has spine. Handler's rich insights and vigorous willingness to examine life with spirit and gratitude make Lights in Cold Rooms a book for all of us as we accumulate the layers of our years.

—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box

As an account of a woman grappling with depression, this book is compelling in its unflinching honesty. It is, however, more than that. Handler delves into the tangle of a mother and two daughters—how the wages of love and loss, of compassion and alienation, play out over the course of a lifetime and how a degree of wisdom is possible for someone who is willing to look deep and hard. Being balanced about our suffering is one of the great challenges in this world, and Handler meets that challenge with grace. 

—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel

In her compelling memoir, Handler dons two hats. The first is as a poet who enriches the text with her beautiful poetic flair. The second, her psychologist's hat, enables her to dive with courage into her feelings and thoughts. Handler shares with the readers her early years growing up with hardworking Irish immigrant parents, who struggle to support a family of six and are frequently harsh on the children. However, as Joan enters adolescence, her mother introduces joy to her life by designing and sewing beautiful clothes for her. Similarly, Handler is able to enjoy her stern father's wisdom and kindness in his later years. We also learn about the universal struggle of sibling rivalry as well as the devastating loss of her sister during COVID. In this way, Handler enables and inspires readers to integrate the good and bad experiences with family members into a whole, and we are inspired by Joan's gift of counteracting pain and suffering with the wisdom of seeking and finding love and happiness.

—Rivka Bekerman-Greenburg PhD, psychoanalyst and playwright

204 pages
Joan Cusack Handler
Pub date – September 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$21
ISBN: 978-1-960327-15-4
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