Lisa Ray Instagram – An honest memoir offers few answers, if any. The quality of the questioning is the thing. It’s Skywalker’s journey, not Yoda’s. And when written well, what is recalled feels like it is happening NOW, the narrative unspooling as unpredictably as life. Beginnings and endings get blurred, revelations occur in medias res…between breaths…and catharsis comes as unexpectedly as a cloudburst. Lisa Ray’s memoir #closetothebone is a scintillating page-turner if you simply follow the outer husk of her life. A mixed Polish-Indian child from a Canadian suburb rises to sudden fame in India as a pinup model, stars in award-winning films (and all the dubious pageantry that comes with boldface headings on celebrity gossip pages). It’s a variation on the theme of a common Disney trope: an idealistically lonely girl relentlessly pursues public affection and material success, and, in the end, becomes victor. And, of course, there are Princes (in this case two who bookend her life: the unshakeably kind and humble father, and the giving, impossibly-handsome husband-to-be). But it is during The Great Unpeeling, when she pushes past the many surfaces, that Lisa’s life forces you to pause, crease the page, take many deep breaths. The car accident that left her powerful mother a quadriplegic when it could have just as easily been her; the relationships that nearly snuffed the breath out of her life; the rare cancer that everyone feared she would never “graduate” from. I knew nothing about Lisa Ray when we met at a mutual friend’s home. I only understood she was going through some challenges. When I read her Yellow Diaries online, I knew that of the multitudes in her, she was also a poet and spiritual guide. To be able to stretch out Susan Sontag’s ideas by making her own illness, particularly during the stages of her stem cell transplantation, THE metaphor for self-renewal and re-seeding…these are the rare qualities of a good writer, when shakti and poetry intersect to force the utterance of the next sentence. CLOSE TO THE BONE is a courageous act of grace and gratitude. So many of us deserve it, and the rest of us, well, we need it. By @chefsangkim