Framing a Life: Building the Space To Be Me

(Paperback)

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On a blustery Maine day, thirty-nine-year-old Roberta Kuriloff found herself standing on a plot of land purchased with her former partner, holding a couple of wood stakes to mark off exactly where her new house would sit. No longer their land. No longer their dream. Now, just hers.

Immersed in a world of blueprints, materials, contractors, and critters, Roberta confronted the major losses shed suffered in her lifein particular the deaths of her mother and aunt from cancer and her separation from her father and brother during her placement in an orphanageand to try to understand how those losses had shaped the woman, lawyer, and activist shed become. As she cleared land, hammered nails, lifted beams, and shivered in her rented mobile home, the answers began to come to her.

Roberta soon found love again, with a woman named Nancy . . . only to lose her abruptly just one year later in a car accident. Her grief over Nancys death, and the psychic and out-of-body events she experienced following that loss, led to an eight-year spiritual quest where she explored her Jewish roots, the Kabbalah, Buddhism, and reincarnation. As she healed, new love beckoned with Berniceand at long last Roberta found that intrinsic sense of self, that unshakable foundation of heart and soul, that home, that shed been searching for all along.

Reviews

This remarkable memoirone of the deepest Ive ever readis my kind of revelation. The book made me cry out, cover my eyes, mourn, beam with pride, and appreciate the trials that led to my own emotional and spiritual growth. Kuriloffs story will find a place alongside Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsand Amy ChuasTiger Mother. Permeated with humility, bravery, and a bold feminist intersection,Framing a Lifeis a triumph for many of us with both hurting and joyfulhearts. It will last in our times and long into the future.
June S. Gould, PhD, poet, workshop leader for the International Womens Writing Guild, and author ofThe Writer in All of Us

Framing A Lifeby Roberta S. Kuriloff is about the search for home, family, and loveyet is so much more. This story examines the grief of losing all we human beings long for in this world, but still moving forward with faith, love, and tenacity. You will smile. You will cry. Best of all, you will cheer on Roberta as she learns home is not necessarily a place. It is embedded in your core, your heart, and your soul.
Laura L. Engel, author ofYoull Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame, and Adoption in the 1960s

Roberta Kuriloff uses the metaphor of home to deepen our understanding of belonging. Overcoming a stark life in a city orphanage, she becomes a lawyer driven to become a voice for abandonedand abused children and ultimately builds a home of her own in Maine to shelter her loved ones. An inspiringmemoir about the construction and union of both an inner and outer life.
Maureen Murdock, PhD, author ofThe Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory

Robertas memoir is honest, poignant, and shares with grace how she overcame her lifes tragedies. Her courage, optimism, and the ways she found and built her true homein the deepest sense of the wordwill uplift and inspire many readers.
Rivvy Neshama, author of Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles

Rarely have I read a memoir that was so captivating. Roberta Kuriloffs resilience and tenacity in the face of adversity is inspiring. Through her work as a lawyer and her interactions with family and friends, she demonstrates what it means to be a compassionate feminist and a joyful, spiritual person.
Patricia Ould, PhD, co-author of Same-Sex Marriage, Context, and Lesbian Identity: Wedded but Not Always a Wife

Framing A Life:Building The Space to Be Meis the story of one womans quest for self-understanding, love, and the meaning of home. On days when I despair that nothing much is going right, I look to Roberta and her courage, perseverance, and optimism. Her story could have been the story of a bitter woman, beaten down by life and loss. It is anything but. It is a shining light held aloft for any woman struggling to find that place within that is whole, complete and at peace.
Cathleen O'Connor, PhD, author of High Heels on the Hamster Wheel,The Everything Law of Attraction Dream Dictionary, and The Collection: Flash Fiction for Flash Memory

Kuriloff tells her amazingstory of resilience. This is the journey of her survival, her intense drive to succeed, and thelater death of her partnera woman she loved. Finding the surprising depths of her spiritual side, shenot only relearns how to love, but she also relearns how to live.It is an intensely personal yet very relatable work.
Linda Bergman, screenwriter, producer, and author of So You Think Your Lifes A Movie: The Sequel

In Framing a Life,Roberta S. Kuriloff constructsfrom fragments of past scenes, journal entries, night dreams, changing states of being, and reflectionsa textual home for herself and the reader to reside in, inside the territory of a culturally evolving America. This narrativeof a return to a whole and expanded self, one evoking Walt Whitmans iconic lineI am large, I contain multitudesis a timely permission to illuminate the manifold pieces of ones own life and reassemble them into a compassionate definition of oneself, alive at a certain moment, in a certain place, in human history.
MarjHahne, writer, editor, and teacher

Author Bio

Roberta Kuriloff is a writer, author, speaker, community activist, and former attorney. She is the author of Everything Special, Living Joy: Poems and prose to inspire; the short story Unearthing Home, published in the Spring 2020 issue of Yellow Arrow Publishing Journal;and the essay Musings on the Word Atonement, in the anthologyArt in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call, published June 2022. As an attorney, her legal work centered on families in emotional and financial crises. She is a founding member of an elderly services organization and two domestic violence projects, and she has also worked as a hospice patient-volunteer and bereavement workshop facilitator. In between her community work, she makes time to enjoy her passions for writing and dance. She lives in the home she built in the woods of Orland, Maine.