Non­fic­tion

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Cross­roads of Bud­dhism and America

  • Review
By – June 24, 2024

Lotus Girl is filled with renowned artists, com­posers, musi­cians, Bud­dhists, and philoso­phers of the twen­ti­eth and twen­ty-first cen­turies. At the cen­ter of them all is Helen Tworkov. The daugh­ter of a melan­choly moth­er and a volatile artist father, Tworkov describes her young self as a foul-mouthed street kid of intel­lec­tu­al­ly elite parentage.

Raised in a sec­u­lar Jew­ish house­hold on East 23rd Street in Man­hat­tan, Tworkov used to feel that reli­gion did not belong to the tra­di­tion of the new.” In prose that is rev­e­la­to­ry and at times poet­ic, she chron­i­cles her peri­patet­ic jour­ney to becom­ing a Bud­dhist prac­ti­tion­er who influ­enced the spread of Bud­dhist thought across America. 

When the mem­oir opens, it is 1963, and twen­ty-year-old Tworkov has just seen the har­row­ing pho­to­graph depict­ing Viet­namese Bud­dhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s self-immo­la­tion protest. The stark image of the monk, engulfed in flames yet sit­ting unmoved, roused [her] search for mean­ing” —an exis­ten­tial quest that would ulti­mate­ly shape the tra­jec­to­ry of her life. This search took her across Japan, Tai­wan, Hong Kong, Macau, Cam­bo­dia, Del­hi, Nepal, and Kath­man­du, among oth­er des­ti­na­tions. It was dur­ing these for­ma­tive trav­els that a Tibetan refugee bestowed upon her the moniker lotus girl,” fore­shad­ow­ing the spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing that lay ahead.

The mem­oir pro­gress­es chrono­log­i­cal­ly, allow­ing read­ers to fol­low Tworkov as she nav­i­gates diverse polit­i­cal land­scapes and artis­tic move­ments across the Unit­ed States and Asia. Of course, we can­not ful­ly under­stand her quest for self-dis­cov­ery and mean­ing with­out appre­ci­at­ing the broad­er con­text in which it unfold­ed. The var­i­ous coun­ter­cul­tur­al cur­rents that swept through Amer­i­ca’s tumul­tuous twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry serve as a back­drop, par­al­lel­ing Tworkov’s own desire to exam­ine and rede­fine her identity.

Tworkov’s work cov­ers a wealth of infor­ma­tion about Bud­dhism, from its ori­gins to its var­i­ous branch­es and what it tru­ly means to be in prac­tice. She proves to be a per­cep­tive and instruc­tive guide. At times, she offers what could be described as enlight­en­ment cheat sheets, out­lin­ing paths to attain­ing the free­dom from suf­fer­ing that the self-immo­lat­ed monk seemed to have achieved. Relax your mind” is a sim­ple, tra­di­tion­al Tibetan direc­tive, more straight­for­ward than med­i­ta­tion and pros­tra­tion, yet it’s more chal­leng­ing to exe­cute than it appears. Relax encap­su­lates the essence of med­i­ta­tion — let­ting go of con­struct­ed real­i­ties,” Tworkov writes. Let go, rest, let it be.”

Lotus Girl reads as a kind of ongo­ing dia­logue between Tworkov’s busy, anx­i­ety-rid­den, Amer­i­can self and her Bud­dhist self who strives to embody peace, despite the tur­bu­lence and chaos of the sur­round­ing world.

Angela Himsel’s writ­ing has appeared in The New York Times, the Jew­ish Week, the For­ward and else­where. Her mem­oir is list­ed in the 23 Best New Mem­oirs at bookau​thor​i​ty​.org. She is pas­sion­ate about her chil­dren, Israel, the Canaan­ites and chocolate.

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