Apprentice House Press,
Profound and beautifully written –Helen Fremont
Truly stunning and emotionally authentic –Sue William Silverman
Stunningly beautiful and fearless –Lilly Dancyger
This is a book that will take hold of your emotions — and, if you’re willing, change you. –Rachel Simon
In 1982, twenty-five-year-old Angie Boggs, pregnant with her second child, was brutally murdered, along with her husband and infant son. Ill equipped for the horror of that violence and the enormity of her loss, Angie’s sister Ona, a college sophomore, felt numb. She also felt deeply ashamed of her inability to grieve.
But shame, like her sister’s absence, was something Ona knew well. For as long as she could remember, she’d felt ashamed of being their parents’ blatantly favored child. The disabled daughter they’d coddled and protected while they alternately punished and neglected Angie, and finally sent her away.
It wasn’t until thirty years after the murders, both their parents gone and Ona nearly twice the age Angie was allowed to reach, that she developed the courage and a detective’s compulsion to learn all she could about her sister’s turbulent life and unthinkable death. The result is Everywhere I Look, a beautifully rendered memoir of sisterhood, longing, true crime, and family secrets. A profoundly moving reckoning and love letter.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR EVERYWHERE I LOOK
A riveting look at the impact of dark family secrets...At its core, Everywhere I Look is a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, and wildly fascinating story about families and the secrets that destroy them. It is sure to stick with you.
— Independent Book Review, Starred Review
Everywhere I Look, Ona Gritz’s memoir, is a heartbreaking portrait of Angie, a young woman who never had the chance to thrive, and her adored and adoring sister Ona, whose quest for answers about Angie’s murder means unlocking long-held family secrets. This beautifully crafted story is devastating and yet hopeful, a reminder that the truth really can set you free.
— Jane Bernstein – award-winning author whose books include The Face Tells the Secret and Bereft – A Sister’s Story
In this poignant memoir, written in the form of a letter to a lost sister, Ona Gritz grapples with the weight of family secrets and the profound impact they can have on our lives. In precise, poetic prose, Gritz explores the complexities of family dynamics and the ways in which her understanding of those dynamics shifts as she reckons with both the shock of her sister’s tragic death and what she learns about her family and herself in its aftermath. Everywhere I Look is a testament to the love between sisters, the difficulty of understanding ourselves within the sometimes confusing context of our families, and the power of confronting the past to create the possibility of peace, and even forgiveness.”
—Andrea J. Buchanan, NYT bestselling author of Five-Part Invention and The Beginning of Everything
Ona Gritz has smashed familial silence to pieces, and pulled the story of her beloved sister out of the wreckage and into the light. Everywhere I Look is a stunningly beautiful and fearless unraveling of one family's party line, and a testament to the deep love between sisters—still just as ardent, tender, and devoted decades beyond death.
—Lilly Dancyger, author of First Love and Negative Space
Everywhere I Look is a profound and beautifully written memoir whose layers unfold to reveal a devastating series of family secrets and a grisly true crime tragedy. Gritz is masterful at recreating on the page the sister she lost, while illuminating the psychological complexity of family relationships.
—Helen Fremont, author of The Escape Artist and After Long Silence
Ona Gritz was a college student when her troubled, beautiful, vivid sister—a mother pregnant with a second child—was murdered. But it would take years before Gritz would begin to understand the complexities that surrounded that death and defined the years of living that came before. With a detective’s determination and a poet’s heart, Gritz explores matters of belonging (and not belonging), being loved and being lost, wishing for and wanting more. Everywhere I Look is testament and testimony, a sister’s transformative journey toward bringing a heartbreaking past into the glimmering light.
—Beth Kephart, author of Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays
Everywhere I Look is part love story, part murder mystery, part coming-of-age memoir. Ona Gritz, in exquisite detail, examines her deep love for her older, adopted sister, a lost, wounded girl, who ultimately runs away—with tragic consequences. The longer Gritz digs into secrets surrounding her sister, the deeper her sadness—and the more urgent the prose. This memoir is courageously crafted like a love letter to her sister, a way to hold the absent sister close. This story of sister-love is a truly stunning and emotionally authentic exploration of sorrow and grief.
—Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
This achingly gorgeous memoir - of yearning for a beloved, long-gone sister; coming to doubt fossilized family narratives; and pursuing with accelerating urgency a multitude of concealed truths - is enthralling, perspective-altering, and compassion-building. I will never stop thinking of its heart, and revelations, whenever a friend’s family story reduces a relative to caricature, or I ponder a lost loved one whose depths remain inscrutable. And I will never stop admiring Ona Gritz - so brave with her honesty, so gifted with her pen, so open to uncovering, beneath opaque answers, the complex and poignant poetry of those dearest to us. This is a book that will take hold of your emotions - and, if you’re willing, change you.
—Rachel Simon, NYT bestselling author of Riding the Bus with My Sister
PRAISE FOR ONA GRITZ
“There are few books of poetry that one picks up and reads straight through because they could not put it down, but Left Standing is one of them.”
—Michael Northen’s review of Left Standing | Wordgathering | 2005
“As readers, we are right there with her on that learning journey. … As we have seen with these honest and moving essays, Gritz seeks, over and over, to claim the many facets of her identity.”
—Maria Scala’s review of Present Imperfect | Literary Mama | 2021
“With casual yet muscular language, Gritz’s poetry sets readers’ expectations of quiet moments and then upends them with a surprise turn of phrase or a devastating event.”
—Ginny Kaczmarek’s review of Geode | Literary Mama | 2014
“The notion that two contrasting things may be simultaneously possible appears in many of the essays in this sensitive and elegantly composed collection. … Ona Gritz on the page is a warm, wise, and concise confidant who deftly turns the craggy rocks of life into touchstones.”
—Ellen Blum Barish’s review of Present Imperfect | Brevity | 2021