trying
trying
Love, Loss and Stop Asking if I'm Pregnant Yet
BARBARA
NUDDLE
A memoir
Barbara Nuddle grew up in Philadelphia in a traditional, middle-class Jewish family, juggling school, clubs, piano lessons and Hebrew school. While attending George Washington High School in the mid-70’s, she became interested in the business of fashion. She considered owning her own clothing store or becoming a stand-up comedian – whichever came first.
Despite her love for the liberal arts, she pursued a degree in business administration at Temple University. “What can I say?” Nuddle says. “It was the ‘80’s.” But in her first year, she wrote a paper on the powerful connection between clothing, personality and memory. It would become a theme in her life and work.
Upon graduation, she took a job as a Philadelphia-based representative for several clothing manufacturers, going door-to-door with racks of clothing and an equal number of stories, mostly about her family. Her close relationship with her mother, who Nuddle remembers as being genuinely funny, gave her some of her best material. It was from her mother that she learned to make sensitive topics approachable. "She’d say, 'Don’t worry that your aunt needs an oxygen tank at the Passover table,'” Nuddle recalls. "'Just make sure she doesn’t faint onto one of our Waterford goblets.'”
Nuddle moved to New York in 1983 to further her career in fashion. By the time she was named national sales manager for a prominent clothing company, she began to feel there was more to life than pushing “pearl pink” or “tropical teal” to clients. Then, on New Years Eve, 1986, she lost both her parents in a hotel fire. As one of her closest friends told her, “You lost your act.”
After a year of trying to remain “normal in an abnormal situation," Nuddle left New York’s Garment Center to study writing and photography. “Photography was an attempt to re-enter my life through the lens of a camera,” she says. “It enabled me to look at what was hardest to see: mothers and daughters, families, people going home for the holidays.” These became the subjects of her earliest work.
In 1992, Nuddle enrolled in the Master of Arts program in Studio Art at New York University. It was there that she began writing performance pieces and constructing video narratives that dealt with loss, family and rites of passage. In her first work, “Coping with Clothing,” she uses her closet as a diary for her emotions as she comes to terms with the death of her parents. In “Dress Me,” she uses a clothing showroom as a backdrop for examining her relationship with her mother and the conflicting needs to be nurtured and independent. And the rituals of her Jewish upbringing are used to explore how family members choose to grieve in “Not so Home for the Holidays,” an award-winning video that takes place around the Passover table.
All of Nuddle’s videos feature combinations of performance, text, family photographs and film clips to tell personal stories that embrace the “normal in an abnormal situation,” she says. “My clothing, like my humor and my camera, give me space to breathe until I feel safe enough to feel.” “Trying” was Nuddle’s first book.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
THE BOOK
In this moving and sharply observed story of love, loss and finding laughter in life’s most trying moments, Barbara Nuddle discovers that she may be infertile. After years of struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of her parents in a hotel fire, she now faces the prospect of being unable to create a family of her own. Nuddle uses her nearly four-year attempt to conceive as a vehicle to tell stories about her relationships with her mother, men, and well-meaning friends, and the challenges of an interfaith marriage. As she contemplates a life without children, she questions some of the choices she’s made that may have led to this moment: a demanding and often mind-numbing career in fashion, boyfriends she was too quick to dismiss, and giving in to her fear of becoming a mother without a mother. With unflinching honesty and acerbic wit, Nuddle takes us on her search for self, all while enduring the best–and worst–of what reproductive medicine has to offer.
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