“A spiritual coming-of-age that brings the reader along in the genuine power of such an awakening. . . . Miraculously well done.”
—The Englewood Review of Books
“One of those rare memoirs that is both honest and fair, that pulls no punches yet lands at a place of hard-earned light and repose.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie: A Memoir (from the foreword)
“This brave and wonderful book made me feel gratitude, care, and something like quiet awe. And it made me think—about generational inheritance, about the ways violence lingers, about forgiveness, and, most abidingly, about my own dead mother. I think of her, and of myself unto her, differently now that I’ve read Shattered.”
—Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Still
“With steadfast candor, Arthur Boers comes to terms with his father’s difficult life and the perplexing dispositions shaped by that life. In so doing, Arthur attends to the complexities of father-and-son relationships and examines the complex inheritance of trauma and blessing that shapes many men’s adult lives. Shattered is finally a story of pilgrimage—a journey of healing, of forgiveness, and of the pilgrim’s clear-eyed and heart-opening pursuit of the Father who calls us to follow him.”
—Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim
“The wrath of father figures—in our childhood homes, in our praying hearts—has been a pervasive, occupying force in our culture for too many generations. It might be coming to an end. Arthur Boers’s tender new memoir leads the way for the next generation’s work of repair, healing, and writing a better story together.”
—Chris Hoke, author of Wanted
“His father’s business was greenhouses, and Arthur Boers’s Shattered is a memoir haunted by glass. Glass breaks in his father’s rages, yet it also illuminates and ultimately proves the truth of Boers’s words that ‘entering the world of trauma is like looking through fractured glass.’ Boers’s Dutch immigrant family brought a legacy of trauma to Canada from Nazi occupation and from customs in which ‘Boers men beat Boers sons.’ The author, a father himself and an Anglican priest, finally escapes his history. Ultimately, Shattered is a meditation on violence and family, redemption, and Eucharistic transformation. In an era as rightly concerned as ours about violence—collective, familial, natural, political—I can’t imagine a more important story.”
—Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
“Arthur Boers’s memoir, Shattered, takes its title from his intimate knowledge of glass—as the son of a father who made greenhouses; as the son of a father who threw a potted geranium through a plate glass window when angered; and, finally, as a minster who ‘stayed pressed against the glass’ (as Simone Weil says in an epigraph to the book), looking for clarity, for the clear light of God. At the book’s center is the question, How do I reconcile all I knew and felt about my father? But this is no memoir of blame. Wonderfully complex, Arthur’s narrative crisscrosses Dutch history, his family’s immigration to Canada, his Calvinist upbringing, and his search for a faith that includes joy, freedom, social justice, and theological rigor. Arthur’s desire: to transform the jagged, shattered glass of immigrant frustration and alcohol-fueled rage into the smooth beauty of beach glass. And as Arthur’s understanding of his father’s and his father’s father’s contradictions grows more complex, he accomplishes just such a transformation—not by simplifying his father or by knowing him any better, but by accepting his father in all his manifestations. This book very carefully fixes the shattered glass of his childhood, replacing what’s broken with new, reglazed glass from which he looks out on the world.”
—Robert Cording, author of Without My Asking and Walking with Ruskin
“How do glass shards become sea glass, smooth and beautiful? Reading Arthur Boers’s meditative, unsentimental memoir, I begin to believe that such transformation is possible, that cycles of trauma can be broken, that if we allow Jesus to tend unsparingly to our wounds instead of trying to hide them, beauty can emerge.”
—Amy Peterson, author of Where Goodness Still Grows
“Arthur Boers’s Shattered takes us into the fascinating world of the Dutch immigrant experience. In exquisite detail, we’re given a rich sense of history—cultural, theological, and family—that stands on its own. But more than this, Arthur reckons with a lineage of male anger and abuse. His narrative reflections gesture the way forward for all of us who carry the weight of familial rage.”
—Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate
