Lotus Girl is filled with renowned artists, composers, musicians, Buddhists, and philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the center of them all is Helen Tworkov. The daughter of a melancholy mother and a volatile artist father, Tworkov describes her young self as “a foul-mouthed street kid of intellectually elite parentage.
Raised in a secular Jewish household on East 23rd Street in Manhattan, Tworkov used to feel that religion “did not belong to the tradition of the new.” In prose that is revelatory and at times poetic, she chronicles her peripatetic journey to becoming a Buddhist practitioner who influenced the spread of Buddhist thought across America.
When the memoir opens, it is 1963, and twenty-year-old Tworkov has just seen the harrowing photograph depicting Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation protest. The stark image of the monk, engulfed in flames yet sitting unmoved, “roused [her] search for meaning” —an existential quest that would ultimately shape the trajectory of her life. This search took her across Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Cambodia, Delhi, Nepal, and Kathmandu, among other destinations. It was during these formative travels that a Tibetan refugee bestowed upon her the moniker “lotus girl,” foreshadowing the spiritual awakening that lay ahead.
The memoir progresses chronologically, allowing readers to follow Tworkov as she navigates diverse political landscapes and artistic movements across the United States and Asia. Of course, we cannot fully understand her quest for self-discovery and meaning without appreciating the broader context in which it unfolded. The various countercultural currents that swept through America’s tumultuous twentieth century serve as a backdrop, paralleling Tworkov’s own desire to examine and redefine her identity.
Tworkov’s work covers a wealth of information about Buddhism, from its origins to its various branches and what it truly means to be in practice. She proves to be a perceptive and instructive guide. At times, she offers what could be described as enlightenment cheat sheets, outlining paths to attaining the freedom from suffering that the self-immolated monk seemed to have achieved. “Relax your mind” is a simple, traditional Tibetan directive, more straightforward than meditation and prostration, yet it’s more challenging to execute than it appears. “Relax encapsulates the essence of meditation — letting go of constructed realities,” Tworkov writes. “Let go, rest, let it be.”
Lotus Girl reads as a kind of ongoing dialogue between Tworkov’s busy, anxiety-ridden, American self and her Buddhist self who strives to embody peace, despite the turbulence and chaos of the surrounding world.
Angela Himsel’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Jewish Week, the Forward and elsewhere. Her memoir is listed in the 23 Best New Memoirs at bookauthority.org. She is passionate about her children, Israel, the Canaanites and chocolate.
