Sensitive, engagingly honest memoir
MANY will be familiar with the writings of Wanda Hennig, in local newspapers and glossy magazines; also on the internet.
Her style is always clean, crisp and engaging.
In this personal memoir she excels herself in this respect, telling her story with wit and verve. It has its dark patches, but these she shakes off with brio.
It’s quite a story, ranging from Durban to San Francisco and, in the later part of the book, Poland, where she has reconnected with family. Her father was Polish.
It’s the story of a sensitive, highly imaginative yet insecure young woman seeking to find her true self in California, where she finds herself living and working for several years in a Zen Buddhist temple where the teachings and contemplations assist greatly in discovering her true self.
She discovers quite a bit that’s positive in this true self (though she herself doesn’t say it) with a stint in the Zen hospice, where she finds herself doing things like singing to the dying.
The “Cravings” of the title refer to a sensuous longing for food, set against a consciousness of the need to control such urges; and a corresponding, though it seems fitful, yearning for sexual fulfilment. She has spent much of her life on diet or celibate or both. This is a very honest book. Hennig shrinks from nothing, not even some of the bizarre sexual therapy on offer in California.
But she explores it with humour.
Hennig has a university background in psychology. Add to this the Zen experience and her branching out into life coaching – in America as well as here – and one appreciates the background that made this book possible.
In California she also enrolled for a creative writing course. While there she sketched out her ideas for Cravings, which were seized on with enthusiasm by the woman conducting the course.
It’s as well she had that encouragement, because the result is a highly personal, highly readable and highly unusual book – very funny and capturing life and its meaning without once sounding like some kind of lecture.