Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana Jessica Friedmann 9781913348960

A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of the tarot brush up against life in a changing world.

The Tarot de Marseille is a 16th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.

Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann's life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.

Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness - and subtle beauty - of 21st-century life.

'Jessica Friedmann's essay collection Twenty-Two Impressions sheds novel light on the potential of the tarot to guide how people move through and experience life ... [these] essays draw connections between the cards and broader concepts, world events, and personal experiences ... Friedmann is an honest narrator who acknowledges and relates to spiritualism skeptics ... A misunderstood cultural phenomenon is used as a window to the human experience in the personal essay collection Twenty-Two Impressions.'

'These elliptical essays form a paean to the tarot and its transformative potential ... Friedmann's luminescent prose underscores how the tarot - maligned by some and simply misunderstood by others - can be embraced to access deeper nuance and introspection.'

'Luminous and tender, full of nuance and possibility, it is a series of personal reflections on each of the 22 cards in the major arcana ... she merges memoir with instruction, historical insights with everyday observation, consideration of the cards' universal major themes with the specificity of her own circumstances, as well as wider reading into art, culture, spirituality, wellness, and shifting social attitudes around the cards. It's a lucid reminder of the "ongoingness" of history, stories, and the self - a meditation on the everyday magic of life and an argument for the enduring legacy of the tarot.'

'Enlightening ... Blending historical insights with her own warm, vulnerable perspectives, Friedmann's book will influence how each of us - novice or expert - reads and interprets the Tarot.'

Praise for Things That Helped:

'[A]n extraordinary account of extreme postnatal depression, as seen from the eye of the storm.'

Praise for Things That Helped:

'Things That Helped is a beautiful book - heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength.'

Praise for Things That Helped:

'Jessica Friedmann has left safety behind and walked into something vast - a self, a world, on the verge of unravelling yet exhilarating and full of love. This book runs deep and wide. It's alive with arresting images, with thoughts too big, sometimes too dangerous, to pin down.'

Praise for Things That Helped:

'Her transportive writing will break you open and fill you anew.'

Praise for Things That Helped:

'While the occasion for this book is Friedmann's experience of post-partum depression, Things That Helped points to the larger question of becoming a writer-mother, and the ways a traumatic splitting of the self might relate to a creative one, and how, in consciously reintegrating aspects of self, a powerful, self-aware, and writerly subjectivity might emerge ... There is an analogic intelligence at work, a sense of metaphor pushing behind each piece of the book, finding connections that weave each part of with others ... There are skeins here, not a single narrative strand, and it is in their braiding that hopes of making and loving are recovered.'