About the Love Is A Burning Thing (Hardcover Book)

A riveting memoir about a daughter’s investigation into the wirings of her loving, unpredictable mother: a woman who lived her life in pursuit of the divine, and who started two big fires, decades apart.
 
Ten years before Nina was born, her mother, Anita, lit herself on fire in a dual suicide attempt. During her recovery in the burn-unit, a nurse initiated her into Transcendental Meditation. From that day on, Anita’s pain became intertwined with the pursuit of enlightenment. 
 
Growing up, Nina longed for a normal life; instead, she and her brother were at the whims of their mother, who chased ascension up and down the state of California, swapping out spiritual practices as often as they changed apartments. When they finally settled at the foot of a mountain—reputed to be cosmic—in Northern California, Nina hoped life would stabilize. But things only grew increasingly erratic. During Nina’s senior year of college, her mother burned down their house and was imprisoned for felony arson. Forced to confront her mother's relationship to fire, Nina discovered her own capacity for quiet self-destruction—and, eventually, with obsessive dedication, began to knit together the truth. 
 
In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina interrogates what happens to those undiagnosed and unseen. This is a transfixing, moving portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that also examines mental health, stigma, poverty, and gender—and the role that spirituality plays within each. Nina’s writing skirts the mystical, untangles it, and ultimately illuminates it with brilliance.