Shoreline

Published by Guernica World Editions

Available October 31st, 2024

Shoreline, a creative-nonfiction memoir, is a deeply personal exploration of the many ways in which exile and geographical dislocation can shape the psyche, while also creating uncanny connections that resound through the ages. Zigzagging across continents and through time, Nayman interweaves powerful stories about motherhood, friendship, and the imagination. She guides us through the subterranean landscape of the self and shows her readers that it’s never too late to forgive.

“A dazzling memoir that artfully renders the importance of connection across time and space.”

"This vibrant book is riveting—not just brilliant, but its work is deep and beautiful, and has lived in my mind from the first moment I dipped into it: so well written, so imaginative, so very present, and so unnerving. A must-read."

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things

"Shoreline is such a touching and stimulating book, filled with haunting details and a lucid and penetrating vision. Superb and stunning."

David Mikics, author of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (Yale Jewish Lives)

"This is a gripping memoir of an extraordinary life. It is written with all the vivid detail of a novel but given added resonance by the pressure of fact behind it. The author explores the notion of identity across four continents and through several generations. Shira Nayman reflects on these [key] issues unflinchingly and with penetrating insight."

Charles Palliser, author of The Quincunx and Sufferance

A memoir in essays about making connections across great distances.

Nayman, a clinical psychologist and a fiction and nonfiction writer, brings her storytelling skills to bear in her poignant memoir. Unfolding across standalone chapters, the book explores connections with lost friends, her children, and her mother, who continues to be a complicated character in the author’s life even years after her death. “To live is to grieve,” Nayman writes, ruminating on the deaths of close friends and both of her parents, as well as imagining the impact her own future passing will one day have on her children: “Shorelines never only offer welcome; they’re ever hearkening departure.”

Born in South Africa, raised in Australia, and now living in New York, Nayman is no stranger to departure, yet her sense of connection with place and people remains rich. Nayman also returns to her Jewish heritage, inspiring thoughtful interactions with writers such as Joseph Roth and with ideas like postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe how trauma transmits between generations.

Through the exploration of Hirsh’s idea, Nayman examines her relationship with her mother in a brilliant chapter that straddles fiction and nonfiction. In artful prose and well-crafted stories about the different relationships with places and people that she has held throughout her life, Nayman shows how “full-bodied relationships are like works of art, defined by hiddenness and shadow, by the bits of emptiness and silence, by the unsayable.”