The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire | 
| Author: Noelle Oxenhandler
Publisher: Random House
List Price: $24.00
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Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 38390
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.8
ISBN: 1400064856
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.603
EAN: 9781400064854
ASIN: 1400064856
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Dust jacket has slight shelf wear. Cover, binding, and pages are excellent. Ships the next business day, with tracking and delivery confirmation sent to your email.
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Product Description
One New Year’s Day, Noelle Oxenhandler took stock of her life and found that she was alone after a long marriage, seemingly doomed to perpetual house rental and separated from the spiritual community that once had sustained her. With little left to lose, she launched a year’s experiment in desire, forcing herself to take the plunge and try the path of Putting It Out There. It wasn’t easy. A skeptic at heart, and a practicing Buddhist as well, Oxenhandler had grown up with a strong aversion to mixing spiritual and earthly matters. Still, she suspended her doubts and went for it all: a new love, a healed soul, and the 2RBD/1.5 BA of her dreams. Thus began her initiation into the art of wishing brazenly.
In this charming, compelling, and ultimately joyful book, Oxenhandler records a journey that is at once comic and poignant, light and dark, earthy and spiritual. Along the way she wonders: Does wishing have power? Is there danger in wishing? Are some wishes more worthy than others? And what about the ancient link between suffering and desire? To answer her questions, she delves into the history of wishing, from the rain dance and deer song of primeval magic to modern beliefs about mind over matter, prosperity consciousness, and the law of attraction.
As the months go by, Oxenhandler is humbled to discover the courage it takes to make a wish and thus open oneself to the unknown. She is surprised when her experiment expands to include other people and other places in ways she never imagined. But most of all, she is amazed to find that there is, indeed, both power and danger in the act of wishing. For soon her wishes begin to come true–in ways that meet, subvert, and overflow her expectations. And what started as a year’s dare turns into a way of life.
A delightfully candid memoir, unfettered, poetic, and ripe with discovery, Oxenhandler’s journey into the art and soul of wishing will inspire even the most skeptical reader to search the skies for the next shooting star.
Praise for THE WISHING YEAR
"This is a wonderful book, full of wisdom gleaned from a year of Noelle Oxenhandler's daring to embrace what she had previously denied herself--her own personal wishes. I highly recommend The Wishing Year for anyone wanting to learn more about what life has to offer when we pay attention to our heart's desires."
–Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big Life
"Do you want to know how wishes come true? Then read The Wishing Year. It's a book that beautifully illuminates the art and mystery of wishing--and it does so in a way that is inspiring, funny, serious, honest, heartfelt, and irresistibly readable."
–Jack Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
"The Wishing Year is an elegant exploration of the way thought shapes reality. Writing with great personal honesty and candor, Noelle Oxenhandler's exhilarating prose takes us deep into the pain and glory of being human."
–Mark Epstein, M.D., author of Open to Desire
“Oxenhandler's new book makes it okay to be a smart, sophisticated grow-up who also believes in magic. She dives beneath the new age veneer and deconstructs how wishes really come true.” –Susan Piver, author of How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 A memoirist uncomfortable with memoir July 10, 2008
Harriet M Welsch (Northern California, USA)
30 out of 44 found this review helpful
There's a lot going for this book, and a lot gone wrong. One gets the sense here of an author interested in wishing and desire, an academic whose editor said, "Noelle, nobody will read it like this. Rewrite it as ~Eat, Pray, Love~!" since memoir sells a lot better than academic treatises these days. This book invites comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, but they are vastly different in tone, revelation, and outcome.
The first part of the book is contrived, as if the author constructed a selective past to support the thesis, working toward a breakthrough revelation and transformation at the end: see, I couldn't wish, I couldn't accept happiness, my gold coins turned to mud under my pillow, but now I have what I asked for!
And yet, for a reader like myself (the target audience, I assume), it's excruciating to follow such a sad trajectory. This could be me. In slightly different circumstances, this has been me, living on "liquids and canned peaches" for months after a slaughtering heartbreak.
The author enjoys research and facts and the academic life, and those are her strong suits. She shines when she's making historical and literary connections, working her fast-moving mind and researching answers. The thick-skinned self-revelation necessary for convincing memoir, however, is notably lacking.
~Eat, Pray, Love~was breezy, self-deprecating, and funny, while this book takes itself quite seriously and, worse, is uncomfortable with significant personal revelation. I hope this book doesn't hurt the author more than it helps. She starts and ends with sensitive vulnerability and often meets her helpers when she is crying or otherwise in public emotional distress.
Some of the most interesting questions raised are left frustratingly unanswered. In a Book of Days format, each chapter a month in the wishing year, the author describes the trajectory of her experiment, from doubt to testing to fulfillment. But those questions become the elephant in the living room. What was the story of the now-defunct spiritual community? She describes the unraveling of her spiritual group in half a dozen deliberately vague and short sentences. Similarly, in a prefatory note, she explains that she overexposed her daughter in a previous book and has agreed to mention her only in passing in this one; again, an important character noticeably missing.
As a reluctant memoirist, she does not reveal the most essential things. Here's a mother who won't write about her daughter, a professor who doesn't write about her work, a spiritual seeker wounded by an undescribed cult - this certainly isn't Elizabeth Gilbert's year off.
I don't blame her, but perhaps memoir is not her best medium. Elizabeth Gilbert made the reader believe that she wasn't withholding anything essential, that the details of her messy divorce were just boring mind chatter, but in The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire, the intensity behind those secrets sinks the authenticity of the rest of the book, especially since one of the three wishes - the most noble, the most devastating, the wish for spiritual healing - goes unanswered, and the lack of answer glossed over, or perhaps not noticed. (Sitting in an empty temple for an afternoon doth not constitute spiritual healing, and the book itself confirms that.)
 The Wishing Year July 12, 2008
Ada Jaarsma
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
"The Wishing Year," by Noelle Oxenhandler, is the kind of book that I am always wishing for--absorbing and lovely to read, and at the same time provocative and intellectually engaging. Along the lines of literary non-fiction like Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone" and Rebecca Solnit's "A Fieldguide to Getting Lost," this memoir stages the existential predicament of how to approach one's own longings and ambitions, with grace and authenticity, while also acknowledging the pressures and realities of our consumer-based society. The comedic pace of the narrative is note-on, populated with wide-ranging geographical adventures, winsome characters, and deeply funny everyday moments. Waking up one January morning, Oxenhandler confronts several absences in her life and decides to embark upon a yearlong quest for very specific objects. Halfway through the book, she refers to her quest as an "experiment in desire," and this phrase seems to embody the underlying ambition of the book itself--to enter into the terrifying quandaries that genuine passion brings with it, while at the same time relishing the wonderful angst, even dread, of wishing. Oxenhandler's experiment gives rise to profound and timeless questions: what do our desires reveal about ourselves? Is it possible to seek spiritual wholeness, or romance, or even financial prosperity, and still retain skepticism towards superficial success, pop psychology, and ego-based desires? Like books by Franzen and Solnit, Oxenhandler's memoir demonstrates what, in my experience, the best kinds of texts ask of their reader--to share in the spiritually intense comedy of human life and to take real risks in the questions that we pose and the desires that we wish for.
Beautifully written exploration of wishing for your heart's desire; shines with intelligence and humor July 13, 2008
TerryE (Rough & Ready, CA)
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
In this wonderful book, The Wishing Year, Noelle Oxenhandler leads readers on an engaging and enlightening journey through her yearlong experiment with wishing. Oxenhandler is not one to easily embrace New Age ideas or magical thinking, and wishing does not come naturally to her. In order to begin making shrines and sending messages to the universe about what she most wants in her life, Oxenhandler must confront what she calls her "skeptical bent and...tilt toward a certain pessimistic melancholy," along with a Jewish-Catholic upbringing and many years as a practicing Buddhist. But as she begins her first tentative steps toward manifesting three deep desires -- to buy a house of her own, to find a man to love, and to gain spiritual healing -- and the universe starts sending pieces of those desires her way, she is hooked.
Oxenhandler is remarkably well read, and she gracefully weaves myth, religion, anthropology, and psychology into the story of her own experiences. Equally at home with Zen Buddhist principles, the philosophy of magic, and the archetypal meaning of Aunt Jemima, Oxenhandler draws readers along on an inner and outer voyage whose landscape includes her own resistance and bouts of despair, the hot springs of Northern California, and healing encounters in Hawaii, Mexico and France.
I found Oxenhandler's writing beautifully lyrical, filled with passages of luminous intelligence and moments of impish humor. Her story made me think about my own travels away from skepticism, which began 22 years ago when I left the East Coast -- where I'd spent many years studying philosophy in Ivy League universities -- to settle in Northern California, where the world seemed so much wider and filled with so many more possibilities than I'd previously imagined. After finishing Oxenhandler's book, though, I can tell I haven't ranged far enough. I think I may need to go out and buy some joint compound and balsa wood, to start building a few shrines of my own!
One caveat: I suspect that some readers may wish for a deeper level of personal revelation, may want to know the gory details behind crises that Oxenhandler refers to almost in passing -- the ending of her marriage or the collapse of her spiritual community that bring the author to the book's jumping off point. On my reading, the book is not about what brought her there, but about the journey she makes from that point on. The story begins when Oxenhandler becomes ready to suspend disbelief and give herself over to the project of wishing for her heart's desire. And that is where the gifts of this lovely book lie -- in the story of how your life can change, once you let yourself believe that just maybe, wishing can make it so.
I wanted to pick up the phone and yell at Noelle to get over it! August 3, 2008
Madison McGraw (Philly, Pa)
12 out of 18 found this review helpful
I did like this book, but I had major irritations with it. While I'm sure most of us who wish for things also worry about the "what ifs" and for every positive, we think of the negative, but Noelle's constant questioning was like a popcorn kernel wedged between tooth and gum. A few things that really bothered me:
Needing to come up with a down payment for her home, her mother suddenly remembers she has a forgotten bank account and gives the money to Noelle to help with payment. Skip ahead a few chapters and Noelle's mother is in debt, suffering miniature strokes, and she needs a place to live. Noelle wonders how she's going to help her mother find money to pay her bills and worries about finding her a place to live.
Well. I couldn't get the thought out of my head...shouldn't Noelle give the mother her money back? And if her health is bad, why wouldn't Noelle offer to take care of her?
We meet her boyfriend Nicolas, who lives in a boarding house (which bothers Noelle) and then ends up moving to his parents house and perhaps, even, living in his car.
Noelle, who has supposedly been immersed in spirituality, does not offer to have Nicolas live with her.
While reading the book, Noelle searching for her spirituality to return, traveling to spas, overseas, etc (yet she is broke?), it's hard for me to feel any empathy for her when it seems that all around her, people are helping Noelle, but Noelle is not helping herself nor is she helping other people.
I am not a student of spirituality the way Noelle claims to be, but I do know that helping others and looking out for others is usually at the top of the list.
Spirituality is so damn simple, and Carole, who was the most interesting character in the book and who should write her own book, exemplified it with such ease yet Noelle could not seem to grasp that having things is wonderful! But having no attachments is the ultimate spirituality, which Carole displays time and time again by her ability to create and let go.
There were many loose ends...what happened to her mother? Were her bills paid? Did she move to CA? Is she happy?
On the whole, a good read. But if I ever meet Noelle, I'd tell her to quit her whining, be thankful!, instead of looking for ways life is going to help her, perhaps if she stopped and helped others and herself, things would come much easier to her. And though love is wonderful, it is not the end all to be all. I have a feeling Noelle is still not yet happy with the person she is, otherwise she wouldn't worry so much about finging the 'right' man.
I really hope Carole writes a book. She is THE BEES KNEES.
 Interesting... August 11, 2008
A Reader
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
I really liked this book and it's not the type of book I usually read. There are too many books,tapes,programs,dvd's,etc. you name it-- we are in a storm of "law of attraction" information these days. But there has never been anyone who is not connected in some way to these products that has written about their personal experience while using this information. Very savvy of Ms.Oxenhandler to write a memoir about this topic as well as timely. Magic is a delicious subject and law of attraction is the topic on everyone's list. Ms. Oxenhandler is very knowledgeable about things that I did not expect to be in this book which is what made it an interesting read. Her experiment in making wishes to better her life was fun to read but it is just one layer of this book. The one thing that did disappoint was that she did not give the readers any information about her ailing mother after she spent a great deal of time worrying about and helping to move her from France to CA. All in all it's a good read. You can read this book over a weekend.
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