The Unfurling Frond by Rebecca Beardsall

Book Review by Colleen Lutz Clemens

Rebecca Beardsall’s second memoir The Unfurling Frond offers the reader an honest investigation of what it means to feel caught in between many worlds. Beardsall’s vulnerability comes through in every vignette, all of which are pieced together in a non-linear style to tell the story of a search for belonging. Longlisted for both the C and R Press Award and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program, The Unfurling Frond gives the reader an intimate look at Beardsall’s life in the United States and New Zealand, life as a first-generation college student and as a young girl growing up in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, life as a believer and a questioner.  Her sense of liminality creates the tension for the memoir as readers meet members of her family—including her brother Dwayne who died in a farming accident when she was 19—and her partner whom she met in a most non-Mennonite way—online during the mid-90s—and uses their stories as the springboard for her own search for identity.  

As with her first memoir My Place in the Spiral, The Unfurling Frond incorporates images and a variety of styles to tell stories that run parallel to each other. The form is almost a character of the memoir; using all kinds of forms of writing allows for Beardsall to take the mundane and draw attention to its spiritual essence. Of particular interest, I found the use of the Oracle Cards and their readings an imaginative way to move the narrative forward. Beardsall uses the image of the unfurling frond to symbolize her unfurling into herself—and for the spiral of time etched into the frond itself. The reader leaves the text with a deeper understanding of one’s search for self, which is the motivator for me to pick up any memoir. Readers will appreciate Beardsall’s willingness to lay bare her deepest questions and struggles in The Unfurling Frond.

Colleen Lutz Clemens is a professor of English at Kutztown University where she also directs the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities program. She is the mother of one and the teacher of many.