To Heal a Wounded Heart

January 8, 2018
In her uneven memoir about the ways Buddhism informs different lives, Jennings, a psychoanalyst, weaves together three stories: her unsettled childhood shuttling between her Peruvian mother and her Scottish-Canadian father; the refugee background of her friend Lama Pema, a Tibetan Buddhist monk; and the unstable family life, resulting in selective mutism, of her six-year-old psychotherapy patient whom she calls Martine. Jennings demonstrates clear insight and deep compassion for all these figures, and has a flowing prose style that incorporates an eye for detail, such as the descriptions of the games she played with Martine as part of therapy. Despite this, the work disappoints. Jennings touches on Buddhism rather superficially, relating the facts of her interactions with Lama Pema that helped her and her patient without offering deeper analysis or introspection into the reasons. The story line spends too much time focused on Jennings’s own feelings, and relatively mild troubles, rather than the experiences of her patient and her friend. Without a clear theme or thesis behind the story, the book is pleasant without being particularly insightful.