I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio Book

Jean Feraca’s road to self-fulfillment has been as quirky and demanding as the characters in her memoir. A twenty-five-year veteran of public radio broadcasting, Feraca is also a writer and a poet. She is a talk show host beloved for her unique mixture of the humanities, poetry, and journalism, and is the creator of the pioneering international cultural affairs radio program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.
     In this searing memoir, Feraca traces her own emergence. She pulls back the curtain on her private life, revealing unforgettable portraits of the characters in her brawling Italian American family: Jenny, the grandmother, the devil woman who threw Casey Stengel down an excavation pit; Dolly, the mother, a cross between Long John Silver and the Wife of Bath who in battling mental illness becomes the scourge of a Lutheran nursing home; and Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist who was adopted into a Sioux tribe.
     While building a career and raising two sons, Feraca learns empathy when she faces her brother’s cancer and her mother’s dementia. As she finds her voice and sense of self, her story moves far afield: a sojourn in a Benedictine monastery, a courtship through the California wine country, a dip into Dante’s hell in Italy’s Appalachia, an expedition in the Peruvian Amazon, a day under a huppah as she marries a Jewish scientist.
     Unique, eccentric, and distinctive, I Hear Voices is a memoir that tells a universal story of a woman evolving to fully embrace her life and the world. Best of all, from themany voices in Feraca’s life emerges one that will be familiar to old fans—and delightful to new ones—leaping off the written page as compelling, eloquent, and surprising as ever.

Publishers Weekly

As a poet and Wisconsin Public Radio's "Distinguished Senior Broadcaster," Feraca knows the power of the well-chosen word. Feraca (South from Rome) grew up attuned to language, with her flamboyant, "Old World Italian patriarch" father defiantly reciting poetry to her mother's cold criticism. Feraca's traditionally Catholic upbringing was full of stories of "saints and virgin martyrs," which gave her "an enduring template of courage and heroism," even if they imparted a taste for suffering that left her "vulnerable to abuse." Feraca tells stories of her dearly eccentric brother, her demented mother, her wretched first and second marriages, her attempt to live the monastic life, her passion for her third husband and his taste in wine. Most remarkable, however, is her account of that pivotal moment when she took Donald Hall's creative writing seminar. Ignoring her disastrous marriage as she immersed herself in writing, she was "Rapunzel, spinning straw into gold." Blending the spiritual and the profane, Feraca is beguiling. (Sept.)