Squirrel Arbor

    This searing memoir graphically recounts one unforgettable year in the life of an extraordinary woman. A Urological surgeon turned lingerie model, Chattins recounts the excruciating personal events that marked her 1999, a year which for her was "like a garden of tombstones."

    For Chattins the year held the slow, inexorable deterioration of three separate marriages, all of twelve years, and all of which met their Waterloo in 1999. Each of Chattins' three divorces is described with courageously explicit candor on topics ranging from sex to emotional abuse to sex to emotional abuse. "The multiscenticities of desire for freedom and captivity were released and recaptured, released and recaptured in my inner garden, my squirrel arbor."

    It was there, in her "squirrel arbor," that Chattins took refuge, not only from her three divorces, but also from the deaths of all nine of her parents. She would sit, on the stony inner outcroppings, and watch the squirrels gambol, gambol, gambol and then suddenly climb." Ranging majestically from the starkly poetic to the "many kingdomed precipices of the obscene," My Year in the Squirrel Arbor is a book for anyone who has loved and lost and loved and lost, and loved and lost again.