Dr. Jennifer Toriello

Held by What We Hold: Apophatic Weight and Embodied Practice in The Magic Hour

The Magic Hour is a hybrid memoir and creative-critical inquiry that explores grief, absence, embodiment, and healing through personal narrative. Drawing from experiences of parental abandonment, body-image struggles, motherhood, physical training, and the illness and death of my father, the project investigates how individuals carry loss across a lifetime and how meaning is made in the aftermath of rupture.

Structured around the metaphor of weight—emotional, physical, generational, and narrative—the work examines both the burdens we inherit and those we assume ourselves. Through essays, poems, fragments, reflection, and scholarly engagement, I explore the relationship between memory and identity, particularly where certainty remains elusive. Rather than seeking resolution, the project dwells in ambiguity, attending to experiences that resist complete understanding or articulation.

The memoir is informed by writers such as Joan Didion, Abigail Thomas, Maggie Smith, and Stephanie Foo, whose work embraces fragmentation, uncertainty, and the limits of language. It also draws upon scholarship in trauma studies, life writing, embodiment, and resilience. In this way, writing functions not only as representation but also as a mode of inquiry—a means of approaching questions that cannot be fully answered.

The project aligns with apophatic approaches through its engagement with what remains unknowable: the absent parent whose story can never be fully recovered, the persistence of grief after loss, and the ways the body remembers what language cannot contain. Rather than resolving these tensions, The Magic Hour seeks to inhabit them, exploring how narrative can illuminate the contours of experience while acknowledging the mystery that remains beyond words.