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Mot: A Memoir
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At forty, Sarah Einstein is forced to face her own shortcomings. In the wake of an attempted sexual assault, she must come to terms with the facts that she is not tough enough for her job managing a local drop-in center for adults with mental illness and that her new marriage is already faltering. Just as she reaches her breaking point, she meets Mot, a homeless veteran
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Hardcover, 168 pages
Published
September 15th 2015
by University of Georgia Press
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I think this book is a brilliant insight into the life of a homeless mentally ill man. Sarah Einstein took a trip that most people would not consider, but the resulting tale will keep you fascinated. Incidentally, I am her mother, so while I am proud of the book, the adventure behind it turned my hair grey. But please read the book; it will make my child happy. After you read it, please give it many stars. Five would be great. Thank you!
Sarah Einstein’s memoir, Mot, is the story of an unconventional friendship. Sadly, most people would run away from Mot, a homeless vet with a cast of harpies and frightening bigots living in his head. Einstein is not most people, and her memoir reveals just how far out on a limb she’ll go to bring comfort and order to Mot’s life, even as—perhaps especially as—her own marriage is falling apart. I found myself rooting for Mot who valiantly resists those alarming voices in his head. He also offers
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This is a very thought provoking memoir. I would like to thank NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read this book for my honest review.
Sarah is a 40 yr. old woman, who is trying to make the world a better place. She is the director of a drop in homeless shelter that was geared for the mentally ill and homeless everything was going just fine until the street drugs started getting smuggled in and the clientele were a lot more violent and the drug dealers were hanging around the place to ...more
Sarah is a 40 yr. old woman, who is trying to make the world a better place. She is the director of a drop in homeless shelter that was geared for the mentally ill and homeless everything was going just fine until the street drugs started getting smuggled in and the clientele were a lot more violent and the drug dealers were hanging around the place to ...more
This is a book about many things: homelessness, mental illness, compassion, relationships, even a bit of a travel narrative. But the core is the story of an unlikely friendship as beautiful as it is heart breaking. I don't read a lot of memoirs or creative non-fiction. Much of that sort of thing is a bit pretentious for my tastes. Besides, I have a huge stack of science fiction and philosophy to read. Nonetheless, Einstein's work is stylish without being pretentious, readable without being
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Sarah is forty, and she’s floundering. Her life’s work, like her mother’s, has been to try to make the world a better place, and so she works at a homeless shelter as its director. But things are falling apart there; whereas once upon a time most of the mentally ill homeless were passive, now meth and other addictions have created so much anger and violence that she isn’t even safe there. She’s been physically attacked three times, one of which was sexual, and her life has been threatened on an
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I have read several other books since I finished this, but Mot is the one I can't stop thinking about. It's a fascinating story, for one thing--a newly remarried middle-aged woman befriends a mentally ill homeless man and travels to see him not once, but twice, enjoying a companionship that's both warm and natural as well as fraught and unusual, while her work and home life are suffering. The prose is evocative and effortless, and I felt transported to the locations described, as if I had just
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This is simply a smart, compelling memoir, without a shred of preciousness or self-indulgence. This is about Mot, and mental illness and homelessness--and a woman's impulse to fix things (including her marriage) with material patches, and selfless engagement. There is so much to admire about this book, which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Non Fiction: Clean, insightful writing; a strange and fascinating central character and a narrator coming to terms
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It is not easy to write a book that drops its reader immediately into story and keeps her there, a book that is simple and direct, but also brilliant and deep. I like to be moved. I like to cry and I like to laugh and I like to feel tension. And I truly admire a story that is simple and directly told, but haunts me once it's over. MOT by Sarah Einstein delivers all of this and more. Einstein gives us much to think about in regards to homelessness and our responsibilities to human beings
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From the unique cover to the first chapter where I read "I'm here to visit Mot, a new and unlikely friend who wanders from place to place dragging a coterie of dead relatives, celebrities, Polish folktale villains, and Old Testament gods along with him in his head," I knew that I would finish this book. In fact, it's the best book that I've read this year. It's an intimate, captivating, and compassionate story of a homeless veteran and a brave woman who tries to help him.
Mot is a memoir detailing the friendship between a woman at an impasse in her life and a homeless, mentally ill man. Carefully written, it informs what it is to be human and how sometimes in life we don't get the satisfying answers we hope for.
I quickly became immersed in the narrative and came to care deeply about both central characters. Sarah Einstein writes clearly but with a keen eye for the moments that illustrate the whole—it never bogs down in mundane.
I quickly became immersed in the narrative and came to care deeply about both central characters. Sarah Einstein writes clearly but with a keen eye for the moments that illustrate the whole—it never bogs down in mundane.
Einstein writes sensitively and generously about her friendship with Mot, a homeless veteran. From the beginning Einstein details Mot's struggles as well as her own in way that is sympathetic yet realistic. I was taken with their friendship, which required much understanding and forgiveness on both sides, and their desire to maintain a friendship that was bound to end, was touching. Mot's uncomfortableness with the world mirrors Einstein's own discomfort in her newish marriage, and their
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I don't normally read a lot of memoirs, but I couldn't stop reading this one. Sarah Einstein draws a beautiful portait of a man in the fringes of society and her own loving but fraught relationship to him. Through the exploration of this friend, she reveals to the reader a great deal of herself. Sarah's prose is beautiful, her writing about the intricacies of her friend's mental illness and delusions is non-judgmental, and her exploration of her own self is fearless. This is a beautiful book
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Sarah Einstein’s memoir is all those, what have now become, cliched phrases used about a wonderful book—”a stunning strength of language,” “tender,” “confrontational,” “grounded in clarity,” “insightful,” “compelling.” Every page, in every description of each character no matter how “minor,” in every interaction, Sarah Einstein writes with concrete, unsentimental directness about what it means to be human.
My review at RAIN TAXI of Sarah Einstein's beautiful Mot: A Memoir:
http://www.raintaxi.com/mot-a-memoir/
http://www.raintaxi.com/mot-a-memoir/
I really liked this book. Seeing into the lives of others less fortunate is always sad, especially the homeless in America. Reading into what it is like to work in homeless shelters and the challenges of both the workers and the homeless is interesting. My 33 yr old son has been diagnosed with a thought disorder almost 10 yrs now. Ive gone to nami classes and done a lot of reading on mental illness. It isn't easy on him or me cause the way the brain works or disconnects is still such a
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In 2011, Sarah Einstein’s essay, “Mot,” originally published by the literary journal Ninth Letter in 2009, won a Pushcart Prize. It was a beautifully realized essay describing the author’s friendship with a homeless veteran, Tom, who prefers to be referred to by the anagrammatic nomenclature, Mot.
As much as I enjoyed that essay, the brevity of the format necessarily left questions unanswered, suspended in space. The resulting portrait of Mot was like the tenuous remnants of a cobweb after a ...more
As much as I enjoyed that essay, the brevity of the format necessarily left questions unanswered, suspended in space. The resulting portrait of Mot was like the tenuous remnants of a cobweb after a ...more
I will say off the bat that memoirs and nonfiction essays are not my usual fare; I usually prefer genre fiction, plays or poetry as forms of expression. With this disclaimer then, I can safely say that Mot was one of the most interesting and moving books I have read in years.
I generally judge literature by three rough criteria:
1. quality of writing,
2. did I have a response (emotionally or intellectually) to it, and
3. did it stay with me. Mot fulfills all these, and more.
The author ...more
I generally judge literature by three rough criteria:
1. quality of writing,
2. did I have a response (emotionally or intellectually) to it, and
3. did it stay with me. Mot fulfills all these, and more.
The author ...more
First things first, I received a free copy of this one in return for an honest review. And boy, am I going to honest the hell out of it.
As the title says, it is a memoir, a true story, of a woman and a friendship. The woman is Sarah, forty, and struggling to stay afloat in the mess her life has somehow become. Torn apart by a job she doesn't feel she's up to and a husband whose attention is fixed on his psychotic client, she finds an odd sort of peace, or at least some sort of getaway, in her ...more
As the title says, it is a memoir, a true story, of a woman and a friendship. The woman is Sarah, forty, and struggling to stay afloat in the mess her life has somehow become. Torn apart by a job she doesn't feel she's up to and a husband whose attention is fixed on his psychotic client, she finds an odd sort of peace, or at least some sort of getaway, in her ...more
What do you get when you commit to a friendship with a person who is intelligent, delusional, grandiose, and terrified? Sarah Einstein’s memoir explores her commitment to Mot, a man she meets during the course of her work managing a homeless shelter in West Virginia. As her friendship with Mot is tested by his eccentricity and her own fears, her marriage is tested on a parallel track. She treats both commitments with honesty, compassion, and more than a little self-awareness, but the main focus
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Mot is a wonderful memoir, and Sarah Einstein an amazing writer. I devoured the book, reading it quickly, then revisiting my favorite parts to relish them. I like it so much that I bought, read, and loved the Kindle version, and now purchased the hardback in hopes I can get it signed. The memoir is full of integrity. She treats Mot, and all of the people in the memoir, with respect. I've read an article (maybe more than one) where she said she felt it very important to stay very truthful and
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