Shimmer: Memories of a Mother’s Love and Schizophrenia with Alexandra Hewett

As part of their “Authors and Oysters” series, The Bookplate in partnership with The Retriever Bar will be hosting author Alexandra Hewett on Wednesday September 28 at 6pm.

Hewett, a counseling psychologist in Baltimore, actor, and teacher, will be present her first novel, Shimmer, a memoir about growing up in the shadow of her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia. Her debut effort is both a love story, a lesson of survival, and healing from the trauma of growing up in a family gripped by mental illness and to help de-stigmatize mental illness by depicting the positive bonds that link us to each other.

Hewett looks at the process of writing her book as an effort to heal through an honest portrayal of her navigation through anxiety, grief and loss using her secret weapons of “Artistic creation, therapy, humor, and effervescent optimism.”

Mira Bartok, author of Memory Place, writes that Hewett’s book “shimmers with light, despite Hewett’s painful and often harrowing relationship with her schizophrenic mother. Told with pathos, humor, and unflinching honesty, Shimmer is the story of one woman’s profound resilience in the face of loss and trauma, and her persistent drive to seek the light, even in her darkest hours. This is a beautiful and hopeful book.”

Hewett is no newcomer to the arts. She is a lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University Odyssey program where she teaches Finding the Funny: Comedy Writing and Performance. She produces the storytelling show Mortified in DC and Baltimore and teaches theatre to Veterans at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. She wrote and performed her one-woman show Mother Therapy at MCS Theatre in NYC and has performed at The Manhattan Rep Theatre, DC Fringe Festival, and the Kennedy Center.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For moe about the Bookplate go here.  For more about Alexandra Hewett please see her website here.