Poor Your Soul by Mira Ptacin

Book review by Rebecca Beardsall

Three books sit on my nightstand as I struggle to get enveloped in a book during the long, dark days of January. Unhappy with my current selection, I look at my large TBR (to be read) stack. Mira Ptacin’s Poor Your Soul keeps coming back to me. It is a book I received as part of a reproductive rights campaign that TaylorSwift_as_Books hosted on Instagram, where authors donated their books to those who donated funds. I was able to pick the author with whom I wanted to receive my book after I donated. I recognized Mira Ptacin as the author of a book my friend told me about The In-Betweens. So, I selected her name from the list, never having read her work. Mira sent me Poor Your Soul, which became the book to get me out of my January reading slump.

How can you not love a book with lines like: “Earlier today, before picking up Grace, I drank wine out of a urine cup” (240), showcasing how life, the reality of it, sometimes seems too unreal and absurd. Yet we are constantly sold another version of life that only exists in movies and television shows. Life is messy, complicated, and painful, as Ptacin will reveal in her memoir.

This memoir is well-written and relatable. It is emotional and honest, as grief and loss are woven throughout the pages.

The title, which I spell out when I tell people what I’m reading – p.o.o.r not p.o.u.r, comes from Ptacin’s Polish mother’s phrase that the reader is introduced to early on in the book when Maria Ptacin shouts “poor your soul” out to her son and nephew as they weed around the restaurant she owns and runs. Ptacin explains, “What she means by this is, ‘If those weed are not cleaned up in two minutes, then I feel sorry for your poor soul because it is going straight to hell’” (47).

A soul lost is repeated throughout the book as the author unfolds how death and grief enter the family. (I don’t want to give anything away, because it is so powerful how these moments come to you as the reader). However, it is safe to say that from the start, the reader is aware of the void left behind as Ptacin shares the reason she is stuffing frozen cabbage leaves into her bra, “In other words, something in the cabbage stops breasts from producing milk, and if I consistently wear these leaves, production will cease. I don’t need the milk because there is no baby. All that’s left is the milk” (3-4).

Ptacin moves fluently through time, retracing her childhood, her mother’s life in Poland, the loss of her baby, meeting her husband, her teenage rebellion. As with memories, they are shifting and alive, and Ptacin brilliantly takes her reader on a journey with her. When death hits a family, the memories are all that is left to keep someone alive, “Mom says that people always remember things the way they want to remember them instead of the way it was, because it was never just one way. That memory isn’t what happened; it’s what happens over time” (232).

This memoir moves the reader through time and memory, weaving together a well-crafted narrative to a realistic, often complex life filled with consequences and difficult decisions, which will make you laugh and cry. Poor Your Soul is a vivid and heart-wrenching memoir.

Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of My Place in the Spiral. Find her at: rebeccabeardsall.com