Lights in Cold Rooms: A Psychologist’s Reflections on Family, Aging, Love, and Loss

An honest account of depression from poet and psychologist Joan Cusack Handler.

Lights in Cold Rooms shares Joan Cusack Handler’s personal experiences with depression as a licensed psychologist with forty years of experience treating patients. For many, including Handler, quarantine precluded the preferred treatment of psychotherapy. Handler turned to her own pathology to teach herself and others how to navigate both isolation and depression. Feelings of anxiousness and impending mortality intensified as she faced the death of her older sister and grappled with the guilt that erupted when she learned that an in-person memorial service was impossible. Opening both her personal history and pathology to public view, Handler chronicles her confrontation with eighty years of family dynamics and explores the path she took to return to a place of hope.

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 one hundred books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded twenty-five years ago, and where she continues to serve as publisher.