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Description:(preview book)

How do you go on your first date after losing your husband on 9/11? It’s been three years and yet Lilly struggles with hope and courage to meet the right kind of man who can help her find herself as a woman again. Kind of tall and kind of shy, Daniel is from another world in Lilly’s Boston, a Beacon Hill psychoanalyst with issues of his own.

Healing Lily tells the unique love story of two people frozen in the winter of their grief reaching for each other, reaching for love they are too hurt to find. Sensitively written, this probing novel explores the aftermath of 9/11 on an intimately human scale reaching deep into the human psyche to touch on themes of the healing power of psychoanalysis and Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.

D. Stephenson Bond is a practicing psychoanalyst who has lectured widely on the topics of myth and creativity. He is the author of four books, including Living Myth: Personal Meaning As a Way of Life (Shambhala) and The Archetype of Renewal (Inner City). He graduated with an M.Div. from Vanderbilt in 1981 and from the C. G. Jung Institute, Boston, in 1997, where he still teaches. A native West Virginian, fiction is his lifelong passion, with short stories including "The Mountain Song" appearing in The Mountain Review and "An Evening at the Symphony" in Scribner. Healing Lily is his first published novel.

In a recent interview, Bond noted: "I got interested in the 9/11 widows in the months after 9/11. I think I saw Kristen Breitweiser on Larry King Live and then read the Gail Sheehey article on the Jersey Girls. What fascinated me so much was that in the months and years after 9/11 those widows represented a kind of moral authority on what had happened, a moral authority that was lacking in, well, everything else. Then my analytic mind got to thinking about them and I wondered how a person would work through an experience like that. And the result was Healing Lily, my first published novel. It's about how people work through grief, but with the edge of 9/11 I think it's also about the change, the cultural change and the end of an era that 9/11 represents, as if it were a collective dream announcing what is coming. But it turned into a love story-quirky, you would say, because an analyst knows too much to be naive about love stories-because when you're a writer the characters take over and go to new places. And that was fine with me. We're gonna need a lot of love to get through this."