Overview

At their family's New Jersey seaside cottages, Susanne Paola Antonetta's grandmother led seances, swam nude, and imaginatively created a spiritualist paradise on earth. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Antonetta chronicles how in that unique but tightly controlled space, she began to explore the questions posed by her family's Christian Science beliefs, turning those questions secular: What is consciousness? Does time exist? And does the world we see reflect reality? In this book, scientific research, family story, and memoir intertwine to mimic the indefinable movements of quantum particles. Antonetta reflects on a life spent wrestling with bipolar disorder, drug dependency, and the trauma of electroshock treatment--exploring these experiences alongside conversations with some of the world's leading neuroscientists and physicists, and with psychics. The result is a meditation on the legacy of family, on thought and being, and what we humans can actually ever really know about our world.

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9780814257807

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Reviews

Susanne Antonetta's latest masterpiece is a divinely composed ode to the 'ungovernable emanations' that are our selves. Gorgeously poetic, deadpan and inquisitive, terrifying and engrossing, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here bridges the distance between physics and the occult, psychology and spiritualism. Antonetta's road trip to a Summerland of the soul is inspiring, unforgettable, and indispensable. --Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack In mesmerizing and gorgeous prose, Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It's hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary. --Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood

"""In mesmerizing and gorgeous prose, Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It's hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary."" --Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood ""Susanne Antonetta's latest masterpiece is a divinely composed ode to the 'ungovernable emanations' that are our selves. Gorgeously poetic, deadpan and inquisitive, terrifying and engrossing, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here bridges the distance between physics and the occult, psychology and spiritualism. Antonetta's road trip to a Summerland of the soul is inspiring, unforgettable, and indispensable."" --Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack"

In mesmerizing and gorgeous prose, Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It's hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary. --Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood Susanne Antonetta's latest masterpiece is a divinely composed ode to the 'ungovernable emanations' that are our selves. Gorgeously poetic, deadpan and inquisitive, terrifying and engrossing, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here bridges the distance between physics and the occult, psychology and spiritualism. Antonetta's road trip to a Summerland of the soul is inspiring, unforgettable, and indispensable. --Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

Author Information

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of Make Me a Mother, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, a novella, and four books of poetry. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Orion, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

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