Unlocking: Memoir of Family & Art by Nancy L. Pressly Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 8/1/20}

Unlocking: Memoir of Family and Art by Nancy L. Pressly
Publisher:  She Writes Press (May 5, 2020)
Category: Memoir | Tour Dates June and July, 2020
ISBN: 978-1631528620
Available in Print and ebook, 224 pages
Book Description:
        While recovering from a near fatal illness, Nancy Pressly discovers a treasure trove of family material stored in her attic. Haunted by images of her grandparents and her parents in their youth, she sets out to create a family narrative before it is lost forever. It takes several more years before she summons the courage to reconstitute a path back to her own past, slowly pulling back the veil of amnesia that has, until now, all but obliterated her memory of her childhood.
       In this sensitive and forgiving meditation on the meaning of family, Pressly unravels family dynamics and life in a small rural town in the 1950s that so profoundly affected her―then moves forward in time, through to her adulthood. With an eye attuned to visual detail, she relates how she came into her own as a graduate student in the tumultuous sixties in New York; examines how she assumed the role of caretaker for her family as she negotiated with courage and resilience the many health setbacks, including her own battle with pancreatic-related cancer, that she and her husband encountered; and evokes her interior struggle as a mother as she slowly traverses the barriers of expectations, self-doubt, and evolving norms in the 1980s to embrace a remarkable life as a scholar, champion of contemporary art, and nationally recognized art museum strategic planning consultant. Full of candor and art-inspired insight, Unlocking leaves the reader with a deep appreciation of the power of art and empathy and the value of trying to understand one’s life journey.
​Buy Unlocking:  Amazon| Barnes&Noble| Indiebound

---

REVIEW by LAWonder10:
In this Memoir by Nancy Pressly is an account of her memories beginning from her childhood through her lifetime. So much of her interests and fascinations, especially of rocks, fascinations, especially rocks, this Reviewer can relate to. Additionally, the loneliness she felt, living so far from other children is something very familiar. Also the simpler life and family values she mentions, many of us older generation can easily relate to.
​
Born with a Jewish nationality, she occasionally attended the Jewish religious services an honored Jewish customs, yet, insisted on experiencing the Christmas Season as other families do. 

She was driven to perfection in all she did. 

This author experienced exciting, adventurous events, yet tragedy, insecurity and painful situations were also very much a part of her life.

This is an account of becoming educated in the arts, a love story, and devastating times , as so many of us can relate to. However, each  life, each experience and all the encompassing variables effects each differently. No two people will experience or react to similar events in the exact same manner. Hence, each of us is indeed an individual.

The author's writing style is done very well. She makes a definite attempt to approach the life events in a story form.. She accomplished this quite well.

I offer a Four Stars rating for this memoir.
*This book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This s my honest review.

GUEST POST

WHAT INSPIRED ME TO WRITE MY BOOK
         Writing a memoir was a completely new undertaking, the inspiration for which came about in a circuitous manner, a reminder that the seeds for creativity may take a long time to germinate. In 2008, while recovering from a near-fatal illness, I discovered a treasure trove of family material in my attic, including citizenship papers, boxes of letters and old photographs, among them a photo of my father’s brother, Max, who died at the age of eighteen. I had never an image of him. Dressed in his handmade bar-mitzvah suit, standing next to my grandmother, this image of Max suddenly made my father’s youth tangible. I found myself overcome with emotion, astonished at the power of images to unlock memories. I suddenly felt a profound responsibility to try to create a narrative of my grandparents’ and parents’ lives before their stories were lost forever. At the time I was still recovering, and there was an urgency to my pursuit because my outcome was still in doubt.
         Trained as an art historian, I am a skilled researcher, and I delved into Eastern European archives available on the internet and examined Ellis Island and New York State marriage, birth, and death records, as well as census information. I discovered a memoir by a young man who had lived near my father’s village in what is now Western Ukraine and emigrated to New York in 1905, the same year as my father. It allowed me to begin to envision my father’s life as a young boy and the subsequent trauma of his immigration experience. From census data and vital records, I learned the family moved frequently, never in one place more than a few years. I also researched my mother’s family and her different childhood. I was able to put together an annotated chronological outline of my family’s history but did not venture further. I was only eighteen months into my recover and was in no way ready to think more deeply about my parents’ lives. I turned my attention to other projects including a scholarly study on the Pressly family in America from 1768 to 1850 entitled Settling the South Carolina Backcountry, published in 2016 after we had moved from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta.
          In Atlanta, I began a new life helping our son, a single parent, take care of his two young children beginning when they were one and three. I became a fundamental pillar in their emotional lives and was filled with tenderness and gratitude for this gift. Immersed in this world, my mind wandered back to my own childhood and memories of my own grandparents who held a special place in my, in this instance me liking to take care of them. I thought again about those photographs I had discovered eight years earlier. I realized there was unfinished business. I needed to write my family’s story and to do this in a meaningful way, I would have to summon the courage to find a path back to my own childhood which had been locked away for so long behind a veil of amnesia. It slowly dawned on me that I should write a memoir and incorporate my family’s history into my story. I had an interesting story to tell.
         I returned to the photographs looking at each carefully then arranging them into different tableaux as I tried to intuit meaning that might lie beneath, to see what stories they could tell. I let them slowly open doors to the past. I returned again and again to the photographs searching for new clues and even had images printed from old negatives as I began to piece a narrative about my parents’ lives and my early years. I also kept a notebook writing down ideas and memories as they came to mind. It was a slow, unstructured process. I was in no hurry, and I knew the details were important. What was fascinating to me was how I first retrieved memories of my external environment as a child: the vegetable garden, the scent of peonies and Lily of the Valley, and picking violets for Mother’s Day. And slightly further afield my love of the beautiful Hudson River. It was only then that I could enter the more interior world of my childhood of kitchen aromas, holiday celebrations, family dynamics, and more painful memories. 
​               Visually aware, I came to see in writing this book that my keen eye, my ability not only to look but “to see,” to intuit meaning beneath the surface of works of art, was linked to my empathetic and intuitive nature, to how I approach life and relate to people. In writing my memoir, my visual awareness became part of my voice and as well as my inspiration. I also allowed the process to be part of the inspiration; I had no idea where I would end up, but I trusted the journey. 

About Nancy L. Pressly
(c)Atlanta Portrait Photography
​   Nancy L. Pressly, a graduate of Goucher College, received   master’s degree in Art History from Columbia University. She began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently held curatorial positions at the Yale Center for British Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art, where she organized several important exhibitions, most notably the acclaimed Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s.In 1984 she became Assistant Director of the Museum Program at the National Endowment for the Arts; was a visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts during the fall of 1992; and in 1993 founded Nancy L. Pressly & Associates, a nationally recognized consulting firm specializing in strategic planning for art museums. She has authored numerous publications, most recently a book titled Settling the South Carolina Backcountry (2016.) She and her husband live in Atlanta, Georgia, close to their son and two grandchildren.
Website |  Facebook 

---

BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE...

​This giveaway is for 3 print copies open to the U.S. only. There will be 3 winners. This giveaway ends August 1, 2020,midnight pacific time. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.

​To ENTER, Click on HERE!

---