"This is a raw, compelling story that explores an atypical mother-daughter bond, and how the human heart processes wounds for which we don't have simple names." --Diana Helmuth, author of The Witching Year "Bailyn shows us what it means to grow up and keep hold of magic and belief in oneself." --Sue William Silverman, author, Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader What fills the void when a mother is missing? For Sasha, it's both madness and magic. A child of divorce in the 1990s, Sasha grows up with her father and blended family in a sunny San Francisco suburb, visiting her mother's apartment in the mist. Her mother is creative, New Age spiritual, and unreachable--often depressed, always somehow far away. In a home fractured by tension, Sasha turns to imagination for comfort, carrying its spells and shadows with her into adulthood.
When Sasha becomes a mother herself, a heavy postpartum fog forces her to reckon with the mother wound she has long carried. To understand her family's haunting yet mythical legacy, she follows the threads of memory through interviews and primary sources, investigating motherhood, mental illness, and seemingly magical abilities. Told through lyrical vignettes in the form of a spell book, Spells to Start Believing is a modern grimoire of motherhood, memory, and becoming. A luminous memoir of maternal absence, family inheritance, and the possibility of transformation.