Letters From A Distant Shore

Tragedy shattered Marie Lawson Fiala’s life as wife, mother and lawyer when her 13-year-old son, Jeremy, was felled by a massive hemorrhage from a ruptured artery deep in his brain. Within an hour, Jeremy was in a coma, sustained only by machines. This memoir of a mother’s ferocious care, devastating loss and prayerful transcendence focuses on bringing her son back from the edge. The suspense is relentless and the author’s observations as sharp as a scalpel.

Marie Lawson Fiala, born in Europe, came to the United States as a child. Her first language was Czech, and she learned English only after starting grade school. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with Distinction from Stanford University, her Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School, and her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Ms. Fiala is a full-tie practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. Letters From a Distant Shore was released in 2010.

NOTHING MARKS the last normal hours of your life as special, nothing that you look back on and say, “There, that was the turning point. If only I had paid attention, I would have known, I would have treasured those hours. If only …” You awaken one morning to the same mundane details as any other day: housework, grocery shopping, squabbling children, sticky hands and faces, small irritations, and small pleasures. Without warning life pivots sharply, and you have left your last, inestimably precious, normal moment far behind. Then you would give anything to have it back, but it is lost to you forever.

In a sea of mediocre memoir, Marie Lawson Fiala’s magnificent, meticulous and utterly moving chronicle of her son’s combat with death shines like mother of pearl. Open your heart to this book. It’s that rare thing—an almost perfect read.
— Jacquelyn Mitchard, Author, The Deep End of The Ocean

Letters from a Distant Shore is a book about Grace: The Grace of love, the Grace of children and the Grace of life itself. Marie Fiala’s beautifully crafted words shine in the darkness like a nightlight, reminding us that even at times of the greatest vulnerability and despair, we are not alone. Bring tissues. You’ll need them.
— Dr. Naomi Rachel Remen

Marie Fiala’s Letters from a Distant Shore is a heart-breaking, hopeful book, one that conveys with beauty and grace some of life’s most impossible disjunctions: motherhood and disability; love and loss; strength and weakness; faith and despair. This is a marvel of a book about the human spirit’s capacity for survival and repair.
— Vicki Forman

“I am a feather fallen off a bird” writes Maria Lawson Fiala’s son, in this heartbreaking and heart-stirring chronicle of sudden illness, his free-fall from childhood. Written in almost unbearable close-up, it is a mother’s tale of ferocious care, wearying loss, and prayerful transcendence. Without a shred of sentimentality, the “letters” dramatize the ways in which a hemorrhage of daily life attends that of the body, and the ways love adjusts its countenance to behold the tender nuances of recovery. The writing is lean, the suspense unshakeable, and the observation as scrutinizing as a surgeon’s, and capacious and resolute as a mother’s embrace.
— Aaron Shurin

Letters from a Distant Shore is an extraordinary memoir of parenting and faith in the face of a terrible medical crisis. Dishes piled up in my sink as I read Marie Fiala’s riveting story; laundry went unfolded and emails went unanswered. Although I haven’t met Fiala or her children, when I turned the last page, I went straight to my computer to send her an email, inquiring about her family today. Her writing will draw you in and make you care. Fiala writes with the precision of a scientist, the grace of a poet, and the fierce love of a mother.
— Caroline Grant

March 2010
338 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$21
ISBN 978-1-933880-19-8
LaurelBooks