Review by Celia Jeffries
This is the first book I have read that opens with a Content Warning. I should not have been surprised; we live in a world where the evening news should come with a content warning. That Christy Tending chose to open her memoir with one is testament to how tenderly she cares for herself, her family, her readers, and our world.
“How do we meet the feeling that the world as we know it is ending? How do we maintain compassion for ourselves in the midst of grief and chaos? How do we inspire ourselves to action in the face of hopelessness designed to keep us complacent?” (i). These are questions Tending has been grappling with for years as she has watched the climate crisis increase. “This book draws on twenty-five years of Buddhism, twenty years of direct action experience, seven years of parenting, and a pervasive feeling that I still have no idea what I’m doing” (i).
Written in plainspeak and lyrical essays, High Priestess of the Apocalypse is more than a memoir. It is a primal whisper, a subversive call to every mother who looks on her newborn with fierce love and wants the world to help nurture them. This is a book to read in one large gasp of seventy-five pages and to return to time and again for nourishing breaths.
Tending’s short vignettes read like poetry. In “Roots, Seven through Fourteen” (10) she takes us through seven years of her life in five glorious paragraphs, landing on how she decided to move to California. “In 1997, I watched the egret stretch its feet through the water where Coyote Creek meets Richardson Bay, and I decided I wanted to move to California…the place may as well have nailed my foot to the earth” (11).
She moves into second person point of view to fill in the years between her decision and her move, in “Ten Things That Will Happen in College” (19): “10. You will discover that everything is holy” (20), then follows that with a direct address “Did you know that when you pour water into a can full of boiling oil, it explodes? The oil explodes, I mean” (21). We follow along as Tending studies for law school while developing a life of active disobedience, and then are given candid instructions on climate justice direct action “Not Legal Advice,” (39) “Arrestee Support Form,” (41) “How to Build a Concrete Barrel” (48). Then comes parenthood. “Like most humans, I am wrong a lot. Since becoming a parent, I have become more careful in my wrongness” (54).
This is a memoir that won’t let you look away—either from the writer’s life, or from the life you the reader are living in. “The world is ending, so we are eating popsicles on the porch. . . the grief is enormous and his hands are so small. So this is what I do: say yes to popsicles to soothe the ache of a burning world. I put my feet up on the ledge of the porch and let his sweaty head press against my shoulder and watch the bees sip from the orange flowers in the front yard. Every bee, a blessing, an omen. A resistance against collapse and apathy” (64).
How do you live in a world that is devolving? By loving it, and fighting for it, the whole and broken, just as Tending says she herself is loved. “And now, as implausible as it seems to me, I am loved whole and broken, covered in tear gas then tenderly stripped naked on the porch (to not track it into the house), and showered gently” (75).
High Priestess of the Apocalypse is a triumph. Ignore the content warning.
High Priestess of the Apocalypse
ELJ Editions, Ltd., 2024, $20.00
ISBN 978-942004-70-7
Celia Jeffries is a writer, editor, teacher, and author of the novel Blue Desert. Her work has appeared in numerous newspapers and literary magazines and has taken her from North America to Africa, and many places in between.