The quiescence found in Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers has a staying effect upon the mind; this memoir lingers in the reader’s memory for some time. – Steven Berndt, Professor of American Literature, College of Southern Nevada
In 1941 Citizen Kane premiered and the author was one year old. The snowglobe Rosebud weaves in and out of his memoir, cinema’s consummate symbol of attachment and separation, the classic dyad of the human being. And its precipitate -- loss.
This memoir discloses and reveals achingly so, often in astonishing and agonizing ways, one man’s travail. Freese is not satisfied to merely recall, to remember, but to metabolize what he has experienced throughout his seven decades. The furnace for his emergence into mature adulthood took place in the sixties, that irrepressible decade that changed America culture forever.
As a retired psychotherapist Freese knows that relationships between one human being with another is a critical human learning we master or we do not, for it facilitates our personally idiosyncratic journey through life.
Tesserae is not only a remembrance of things past but a reworking and critical recollection of experience and events Freese encountered in his late twenties.
The most telling – and compelling aspect – is his capacity to learn from struggle.
In the summers of ’68 and ’69 Freese lived in Woodstock, and his life was transformed. Tesserae richly explores how the counterculture kneaded him, how it enlarged his perspective, and how it encouraged him to be more open and express.
In his seventies now, Freese looks back not so much in regret but in knowing he had experienced that rare spiritual event, an awakening of intelligence. The reader now shares in his tested perceptions, his hard-earned observations about relationships; of how many of us go to our graves unknown to our selves.
Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers concludes on an existentialist note. A man who has faced considerable adversity in his life, Freese has prevailed.
Endorsement: “In reading Mathias Freese’s Tesserae, however, it becomes clear that this is no mere pastiche of other works; his memoir stands above much of the crowd in its commitment to ask, “What is it to remember? To recall, retrieve, reflect, to go back for a moment, to feel a period of time long since gone.” By posing these questions, Freese works within the answers by tenderly plaiting a web that spreads from Woodstock, Las Vegas, Long Island and North Carolina. The author locates friends and family, lovers now long since gone, desire and passion sometimes quenched sometimes unrequited, and the harrowing agony that comes from that most soul crushing word of all, regret.” Steven Berndt, M.A.
- Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers by Mathias B. Freese;
- Wheatmark; Non-fiction;
- Soft Cover
- 978-1-62787-353-6 $12.95
MATHIAS B. FREESE is a writer, teacher and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, This Mobius Strip of Ifs, was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 in general non-fiction and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust was the winner of the Beverly Hills Book Awards, Reader’s Favorite Book Award, Finalist of the Indie Excellence Book Awards, and finalist at The Paris Book Festival and the Amsterdam Book Festival.
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