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Articles about Ordinary Losses:

Relevant
Read the article in the May-June 2005 issue of Relevant magazine: "The Beautiful Letdown," p. 76 (not available online).

Reviews of Ordinary Losses:

Hearts & Minds
Midwest Book Review
Today's Christian Woman
CBA Marketplace
FaithfulReader.com
Booklist
Publishers Weekly

Hearts and Minds, September 2005
This beautiful little paperback is exquisite memoir. It is about common losses, stuff particularly that younger folk need to attend to. That makes it pretty unique, I think. ... Ordinary Losses is a gentle set of reflections—not as much of a full narrative as many bone fide memoirs—on the kinds of things that the author find sadness in. She is a good writer, a fine crafter of prose, and she is spiritually mature and deep, without being arcane or speculative. She is a reliable storyteller and, therefore, a reliable guide.

—Byron Borger

To read the whole review online, go to Hearts & Minds.

Midwest Book Review, February 2005
In Ordinary Losses: Naming The Graces That Shape Us, Elisa Fryling Stanford (non-fiction editor for Shaw Books at WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House) deftly explores the losses that are the common experience of young adulthood, with an especial focus upon the healing that comes through naming the losses that accompany each transition from childhood to adult responsibilities. Drawing upon her own life for illustration, Stanford reveals the major life changes presented by marriage, career, and parenthood. Sharing personal stories of her losses and how they shaped her character and views, Stanford shares how the recognition of loss brought her hope and the possibility of redemption. Specific chapters cogently address a range of issues including home, relationships, courage, and identity. Ordinary Losses is welcome and recommended reading for anyone within a Christian community seeking to see “the pattern of God” in the workings of their own personal life history.

—Susan Bethany

Today's Christian Woman, January-February 2005
Twenty-something author Elisa Stanford says she's “young and tired in an old and tired world.” Many young women can relate. With a fresh and engaging sense of wonder, Elisa's memoir explores the state of flux we live in from the moment we’re born. Everything changes—our perceptions of home, God, time, friends—and brings with it a sense of loss. And yet, as Elisa beautifully reveals, all that we leave behind serves to shape us into all that we will become.

Ordinary Losses is a Today's Christian Woman recommended book.

CBA Marketplace, December 2004
It's ironic that comparing our similarities with others often allows us to discover our uniqueness. Stanford repeatedly brings this truth home as she shares remembrances of personal losses.

Readers will find themselves nodding in sympathetic recognition as she describes moving from a cherished home, leaving a favorite teacher for the next grade, and even the loss of confidence before an all-important piano recital. Far from being depressing, the approach is a quiet, uplifting examination of how our daily losses make way for growth and strength.

Slightly reminiscent of Kathleen Norris's writing, Stanford’s insights are beautifully expressed and often poetry-like in their intensity. Appreciating loss as part of life will appeal to women readers, and the fairly slim volume will make an excellent gift for those who enjoy contemplative reading.

—Susan Dunman

FaithfulReader.com, October 2004
In a series of 12 short autobiographical essays, Shaw Books editor Elisa Fryling Stanford takes a reflective look at “the losses we never bury and rarely mourn—the absences that grow so slowly we barely notice the void they leave.” These are not the life-changing losses—the death of a parent, the unraveling of a marriage, the razing of the generations-old family homestead. Instead, these are the losses we experience in the ordinary, day-to-dayness of our lives: the slow erosion of a friendship due to a change in geography or the simple passage of time; the disappearance of a comfortable routine such as the “coming-home hours and staying-home evenings of childhood”; the evaporation of “the voice I was learning in my private prayers,” the voice of God that would not survive a public airing.

Stanford writes exquisitely of these and other losses from the perspective of a single and, later, newly married woman in her twenties. ... Ordinary Losses is a book to be savored and Stanford an author to be treasured. Let's hope we hear more from her in the years to come.

—Marcia Ford

You may read the entire Marcia Ford review, plus a second review, at FaithfulReader.com.

Booklist, October 1, 2004
Welcome aboard Stanford's ship of memories. Ports of call include the times of her life when things changed: speaking her first sentence, moving to a new home when four years old, starting Sunday school, going to graduate school, getting married, and many others. While her stopping places offer many opportunities to savor the rich experience of youthful newness, they also present chances to reflect on the often subtle awareness of personal loss they trigger. For example, Stanford confesses that it might have taken her a long time to speak her first sentence because “Perhaps I sensed that once I chose to have a voice, I risked losing it.” We don't always notice losses, she says, while we are caught up in the thrill of moving ahead—especially when we are young. So she writes memoirs of events common to most young people, transforming them into points on a chart that shows how the sweet and the bitter shape us into who we are now and will continue to mold us.

—Donna Chavez

Publishers Weekly, September 13, 2004
One does not often run across an intelligent young essayist whose parents nurtured her, whose church shaped her, whose husband is devoted to her and whose God cares for the details of her life. What, one might wonder, could she possibly write about? Stanford, a 20-something editor at WaterBrook, says she is writing about loss—not searing anguish like widowhood or a terminal diagnosis, but cumulative small losses like leaving one’s childhood home, or having to give up one good thing in order to choose another. Loss is indeed woven into every chapter, but it is just one thread in the larger picture: this is also a book about moving into adulthood. Now finished with grad school, married and beginning a career, she asks: “How do we stand on the edge of what we do not know, with only the love of God to hold us?” Stanford, who describes herself as “young and tired in an old and tired world,” muses on such coming-of-age topics as relationships, passion, voice and identity, setting them in a magical framework of Christmas pageants and thunderstorms, best friends and wild bike rides, a beagle puppy and endless bedtime stories. In these literary essays, paradise is both lost and regained as the author gracefully explores her childhood intimation that “no mystery was too much to consider.”