Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Tizita
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.sharonheath.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no 97060473
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no97060473
HEADING: Heath, Sharon
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PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles; Immaculate Heart College, M.A., 1982.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and psychoanalyst. C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, faculty member, 1993–; Jungian analyst in private practice, Los Angeles, 1994–.
AVOCATIONS:Anglophile and a film buff.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, periodicals, and websites, including Psychological Perspectives, Jung Journal, Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Huffington Post, and TerraSpheres. Former associated editor of Psychological Perspectives and guest editor of the special issue “The Child Within/The Child Without.”
SIDELIGHTS
A certified Jungian analyst in private practice, Sharon Heath also writes fiction and nonfiction. Her works primarily focus on the interplay of science and spirit, politics, and pop culture, and contemplation and community. Heath is also an educator and public speaker who has given talks in the United States and Canada on a wide range of topics, including soul in social media, belonging, envy, gossip, and secrecy. Heath is also the author of “The Fleur Trilogy.”
The History of My Body
The trilogy begins with The History of My Body, which introduces readers to Fleur Robins, a young girl believed by those around her to be weird and possibly autistic but who may really be a genius. In an article or the Huffington Post website, Heath mentioned The History of My Body as an example of novels with youthful protagonists who remind older readers that their younger lives were not as easy as they recall. Heath writes in the Huffington Post that adult fiction featuring child protagonists undergoing a catharsis gives “us a chance to revisit our early years with imagination and wisdom and see the world and our own lives with new eyes.”
In The History of My Body Fleur lives with her eccentric family on her father’s estate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fleur is largely ignored by her family. Her mother is an alcoholic and her father is an activist out to stop the evil abortionists. Fleur is an odd child who likes to whirl around and seems preoccupied with God, what she calls “the void,”and her devotion to her grandfather. Then Fleur gets a new tutor, Adam Manus, who sees that Fleur has a lot of potential. He introduces her to Stanley H. Fiske, a Noble Prize winner who ends up bringing Fleur to the California Institute of Technology, where he mentors Fleur in quantum physics. Fleur quick proves that her tutor was right in recognizing her genius as she begins making important discoveries that may help phase out the use of fossil fuels. Still, Fleur is very naive and ends up losing her virginity by no conscious choice of her own.
“In her wise, superbly crafted debut novel, author Sharon Heath connects a series of highly improbable events into a tightly knit story about a self-taught young girl who believes her coming of age is a wonderful example of the butterfly effect: or, as Fleur came to understand nonlinear systems, a personal development with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” wrote Malcolm R. Campbell for the Malcolm’s Round Table website. A Literary Aficionado website contributor remarked: “Heath must be commended—there is a thin, dangerous line for a novelist between such complexity being the beautiful quirk of main character and an indication of poor planning and execution by a writer unable to bring their broad worldview into manageable scope. It is clear that Heath has been purposeful and exacting.”
Tizita
The next book in “The Fleur Trilogy,” Tizita, finds that Fleur is not a recognized physics wunderkind who still has difficulty understanding people, especially when it comes to love and sex. Fleur is working on a project to address climate change when it suddenly stalls. Her fiancé, Assefa, born in Ethiopia, ends up taking off following Fleur’s twenty-first birthday to try and find his father, who has disappeared during an investigation into the Ark of the Covenant’s potential discovery in Ethiopia. Meanwhile, Fleur has turned her attention to contemplating the parallel worlds theory in physics.
Fleur ends up going to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve to console herself after learning that Assefa, who has found his fathe, has decided to remain in Ethiopia for a while. The decision is made after he comes across Makeda Getey, his beautiful childhood friend who is helping to run an orphanage for children with AIDS. Subplots include Fleur trying help her best friend who is in an abusive relationship while also dealing with a new research assistant who seems to be falling in love with her. “Heath’s adroit writing makes Fleur’s remarkable life consistently captivating,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, October 23, 2017, review of Tizita, p. 62.
ONLINE
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (April 3, 2012), Sharon Heath, “7 Child Protagonists that Adults Can Relate To.”
Literary Aficionado, http://literaryaficionado.com/ (April 3, 2017), review of The History of My Body.
Malcolm’s Round Table, https://malcolmsroundtable.com/ (February 5, 2012), Malcolm R. Campbell, review of The History of My Body.
Sharon Heath Website, http://www.sharonheath.com (March 28, 2018).
Sharon Heath, certified Jungian Analyst in private practice and author of The Fleur Trilogy, writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture, contemplation and community. A faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, she served as Associate Editor of Psychological Perspectives and Guest Editor of the special issue The Child Within/The Child Without. She has given talks in the United States and Canada on topics ranging from the place of soul in social media to gossip, envy, secrecy, and belonging.
Jungian Analyst and Author of the Fleur Trilogy
www.sharonheath.com/ Immaculate Heart College
Greater Los Angeles Area 500+ 500+ connections
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Experience
www.sharonheath.com/
Author, The Fleur Trilogy
Company Namewww.sharonheath.com/
Dates EmployedDec 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 4 mos
Books 1 and 2 of The Fleur Trilogy, The History of My Body and Tizita, are published by Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, available in print and e-versions at Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.
Media (1)This position has 1 media
Sharon Heath
Sharon Heath
This media is a link
Private Practice
Jungian Analyst
Company NamePrivate Practice
Dates Employed1994 – Present Employment Duration24 yrs
LocationGreater Los Angeles Area
C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
Faculty Member
Company NameC.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
Dates Employed1993 – Present Employment Duration25 yrs
Education
Immaculate Heart College
Immaculate Heart College
Degree NameM.A. Field Of StudyPsychology
Dates attended or expected graduation 1978 – 1982
U.C.L.A.
U.C.L.A.
Robert Henderson
SHARON HEATH, MA, MFT, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Los Angeles and is a member of the faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She is the author of The History of My Body (Fisher King Press, 2011) and has a chapter in Marked by Fire (Fisher King Press, 2012). She has also published articles in Psychological Perspectives, JUNG JOURNAL: Culture & Psyche, Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Huffington Post, and TerraSpheres. She has two adult children, three cats, practices yoga, is an environmentalist, an Anglophile, and a film buff. Sharon is currently writing a sequel to The History of My Body and maintains a blog at www.sharonheath.com. Correspondence:sharonheath@sharonheath.com.
7 Child Protagonists That Adults Can Relate To
By Sharon Heath
Birthday party favors, first snowflakes, first kisses. Learning how to pitch a ball, toast a marshmallow, ride a bike.
As much as we wax nostalgic about our wonder years, let’s face it: most of us didn’t have it that easy. The early joy of discovery and untamed enthusiasm sit right alongside the precariousness of being dependent on far-from-perfect grownups in a far-from-ideal world. The very same openness that can prompt million-watt smiles makes kids particularly vulnerable to cruelty, confusion, loneliness, and powerlessness (or what the young protagonist of my novel The History of My Body calls “the void”).
Which is where the catharsis of fiction written for adults with child protagonists comes in—offering us a chance to revisit our early years with imagination and wisdom and see the world and our own lives with new eyes.
Whether the heroes and heroines of these books are precocious or tentative, suicidal or resourceful, disconnected or endearing, each of them bumbles along as we all did—as we all do!—without a handbook. Almost all of them suffer the mixed blessings of uniqueness and otherness, and a number of the current crop view life through the lens of autism—an apt metaphor in this age of preoccupation with iEverythings, where researchers are telling us our kids are losing the capacity to read facial expressions and social cues.
When these varied young protagonists lead us to a little piece of redemption, it’s invariably through their flaws and woundedness, just as in fairy tales it’s the fools who solve the riddles, save the kingdom, and find the way home. Here are seven very novel novels that turn back our clocks and lead us forward into futures we might never have imagined, capturing our hearts and stretching our minds along the way.
Print Marked Items
Tizita
Publishers Weekly.
264.43 (Oct. 23, 2017): p62+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Tizita
Sharon Heath. Thomas-Jacob Publishing, $14.99 trade paper (342p) ISBN 978-09979517-2-1
Heath (The History of My Body) continues the story of fictional young Nobel laureate Fleur Robins as she
pursues matters of the heart as well as her cutting-edge physics research, while facing challenging social
interactions. Fleur's 21st birthday celebration is also her send-off for her fiance, Assefa Berhanu, who is
returning the following day to his native Ethiopia in search of his missing father. At Caltech, Fleur and her
research team discuss possible avenues to harness the "dark matter within all living organisms" to transport
people by means of "the principle of dematerialization." After finding his father, Assefa remains in remote
Ethiopia to reconnect with the beautiful Makeda Geteye, whom he knew as a child and who is now part of a
team running a home for children orphaned by AIDS. Meanwhile, Fleur deals with the crush that a new
research assistant has on her, Assefa's sudden physical and emotional distance, a neighborhood squabble,
and some medical issues. With so much going on, this could feel overstuffed, but Heath's adroit writing
makes Fleur's remarkable life consistently captivating. (BookLife)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tizita." Publishers Weekly, 23 Oct. 2017, p. 62+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512184163/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=54496cc9.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512184163
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Review: ‘The History of My Body’ by Sharon Heath
Posted on February 5, 2012
“The Bible says that in the beginning was the void, and it hasn’t escaped me how fast the Lord moved to take care of His own particular vacuum—dividing day from night, spitting out vast oceans, carving out competing continents that would one day have the power to blow each other up. What an inspired series of creations to keep the devil of boredom at bay. No wonder God kept seeing that it was good.”
So begins the story of Fleur Robins.
Fleur Robins is called creepy child, poor child, little monster, odd duck, space cadet and assorted other synonyms for “weird” by almost everyone who notices her existence and tries to figure out whether she is gifted, autistic, simply hopeless or hopelessly simple. Fleur’s imagination contains many worlds because—as she explains life as the fifteen-year-old narrator of The History of My Body—positioning her body and mind “just this side of the lurking pit of nothingness” requires constant vigilance and ingenuity.
Whenever the void looms too large for her to handle, Fleur flaps her arms, bangs her head, pinches herself, emits strange noises and makes oddly literal pronouncements that simultaneously appear to miss the point and contain cosmic truths. No school will take her. An alcoholic mother loves her, but spends her days drunk or asleep. A mean-spirited father dislikes her, but fills his days with a pro-life crusade while filling an entire nursery wing of the family’s large house with children rescued from the “devil abortionists.” An odd-duck household/nursery staff cares for her, but is too busy to overtly save her from the void.
Fleur is her own teacher. She makes lists, keeps diaries, consults the dictionary frequently, and assembles the often-confusing puzzle pieces of information from others to make sense of the external world. She listens to the voices of her heart and her infinite imagination to define her internal world and to explore far-flung probabilities beyond the ken of “normal people.”
When she’s told that a woman who walks down the street every day in a bathrobe has lost her mind, Fleur falls into a figurative pit considering the ramifications:
“What kind of God would let people lose their minds? And was there some kind of cosmic Lost and Found where He kept them? I tell you, it gave me a serious case of the heebie-jeebs, thinking of God feeling so empty and alone that He needed to steal people’s minds to stuff into His own unfillably huge one.”
In her wise, superbly crafted debut novel, author Sharon Heath connects a series of highly improbable events into a tightly knit story about a self-taught young girl who believes her coming of age is a wonderful example of the butterfly effect: or, as Fleur came to understand nonlinear systems, a personal development with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Potential events spin off in all directions when Fleur finds a dying baby bird in the garden; while those that ultimately manifest as her body’s history could never have been predicted, they represent a meaningful synchronicity if not harmony.
Fleur’s phases of growth (incarnations, to her way of thinking) unfold as a metamorphosis out of the chaos of her childhood. Her progress isn’t ugly duckling to swan. It’s more like a butterfly transitioning from egg to larva to pupa to adult, or like the unfolding of the beloved David Austen roses she tended on the grounds of the childhood home of her first incarnation.
In The History of My Body, Sharon Heath masterfully combines darkness and light, tragedy and comedy, and the sublime and the ridiculous into a dazzling and beautifully ironic dance of opposites that create an unusual and endearing protagonist with an unforgettable tale to tell.
–
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of four novels, including the recent contemporary fantasy “Sarabande.”
The History of My Body
Posted on April 3, 2017 by LA Editor
“How to Manage the Void”
I am going to be up front here. I love this book, which is in large part due to its main character, Fleur Robins, daughter of an ultra-Conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who had Fleur as a teenager. Fleur is one of the most delightful, complex, and often contradictory child characters since Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great—two characters that had a profound impact on my childhood and, subsequently, my life.
Perhaps it is my own growing fascination with Complexity and Chaos Theory, but I have been noticing a recent trend in storytelling—be it novels, television, or (to a lesser extent) film—that comes into play with Sharon Heath’s approach. It began with the male anti-hero in television shows like The Leftovers and Walking Dead, who is flawed, isolated, and oftentimes just plain Wrong. That trend has now broadened and extended to not only female characters, but to entire families. I just finished watching the debut season of Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix. Not only are the relationships between spouses, parents and children, bosses and co-workers, neighbors, and so on incredibly Complex and always on the verge of or in the midst of Chaos, but these multi-level flaws create a much richer, deeper view of Life as We Know It than I think was ever possible before.
It is through this lens that I read Sharon Heath’s novel. Fleur is a study in Dichotomy. Her Nobel-level brilliance couples with a naivety that makes her the prey of the opposite sex; a brilliant vocabulary and a tendency to misinterpret what people are saying make for socially awkward instances and relationship troubles; a dynamic tension between the Private and Public drives her onward through her pre-teen and early teen years with a speed and recklessness fraught with peril and outsized Consequences.
Indeed, aren’t we all, in this post-post-Modern age of sound bites, tweets, and swiping left or right, struggling with the same? The connection between brilliance and lack of common sense; our struggles for True Communication in a world of digital shorthand and diminishing attention spans; of the Public and Private masks that we switch on and off with increasing rapidity; the lessons that come so fast while we are multi-tasking and trying desperately to problem solve on micro and macro scales—it all adds up to a life of Contradictions and Complexity.
This is the life of Fleur Robins. We know from the subtitle that the first book is part of a trilogy and that Fleur is talking to us, not from the present, but from the future. This is a brilliant device on Heath’s part because we experience two points in time simultaneously—Fleur’s experiences (and they are myriad and at times cringe-worthy) and her later self’s recording them after the benefit of time, processing, and maturity.
Given that Fleur, mistaken for learning disabled when she was actually capable of groundbreaking discoveries in Quantum Mechanics when she was barely in double digits age-wise, is obsessed with questions of the Void and Time and Life and Death—questions that work in tandem with the events unfolding in the novel.
But Fleur is not on her own as far as the heavy lifting in all of this relentless Complexity and Chaos. There are her aforementioned parents, who have clear arcs of their own; Fleur’s grandparents; the domestic staff; and the classmates, teachers, and colleagues whom Fleur encounters on her accelerated journey through the educational system (which takes her from a loose version of home schooled to a school for the gifted and talented, to Stanford University).
Although I am tempted to reveal details of Fleur’s experiences, they are all so wonderfully delightful in their unfolding that I will instead keep my remarks general and focus on the overall themes the author employs. As indicated by my choice of title for this review, the Void is a central feature. Calling to mind the alchemical term nigredo, which is the starting material from which everything is created or, even better, a place of infinite possibility, I began to notice the myriad alchemy at work in The History of My Body. There are gardeners and cooks, and quantum physicists—masters of alchemy all. And the journeys of love and forgiveness the reader experiences are of course the heart and soul of alchemy—the transmutation of baser emotions into love. And the journey is difficult for everyone involved: It was hard to see Fleur’s starting condition of “she is too dim to be helped” morph into “she’s such a genius, she doesn’t need help” before continuing on to something resembling a healthy balance. In line with the quantum physics elements of the book, Fleur’s philosophy demonstrates an early working of a Theory of Everything—a rich landscape of overlapping, intertwining, complementary, and at times contradictory metaphors, thought-arcs, and theories Fleur is always apt to test with full fervor.
Heath must be commended—there is a thin, dangerous line for a novelist between such complexity being the beautiful quirk of main character and an indication of poor planning and execution by a writer unable to bring their broad worldview into manageable scope. It is clear that Heath has been purposeful and exacting. Like the best sit-com writers, she repeatedly sets up a “plant” that plays out more fully as the story it resides in reaches its crescendo, creating a “mini-explosion” of meaning of which Fleur would wholeheartedly approve.
Because of her inclination toward diving in head first and asking questions later, Fleur really does remind me of Holden and Sheila. And also of Michael from the hit sit-com The Office. As much as I loved and rooted for him (and precisely because of this connection) I cringed at least once an episode as his incomplete understanding of a situation or some mixed-up mathematics that altered the actual equation of his reality led him to embarrassing and hurtful moments. And Fleur has more than her share of all of these for a girl her age.
To paraphrase Fleur, stories were made to fill the void. Especially ones as richly written as this one. I look forward to continuing Fleur’s adventures when Book 2 comes out.
TITLE: The History of My Body
AUTHOR: Sharon Heath
PUBLISHER: Thomas-Jacob Publishing
ISBN: 9780997951707