Resilience Bound

A mother and daughter – Sissy Taran and Tiffany Howard – have co-written a book of the sort one reads in a single stunned sitting. The volume’s title – We are Resilient – is boldly declarative at first glance, but wading into the book (and it is designed as a series of digestible, stupefying short reads), one realizes the title is a crazed understatement. The book will be discussed by Sissy Taran, Andy Gilliland, and (the unstoppable) Grace Fisher on Thursday, August 13, 5:30 pm to 7 pm in the Central Library’s Faulkner Gallery. 

The fifteen folks featured in the book are connected by a common thread, each having been dealt bespoke personal misfortune of the kind that hobbles and breaks the under-equipped. The book’s featured interviewees were able to meet the trials sent to immolate them, repurpose that combustible violence as propellant, and – through shear volition and fortifying love – lift themselves into new orbits, new lives. “Inspiring” is a lame and inadequate adjective when applied to the subjects in We Are Resilient. For these interviewees, “despair” is the puny extra tire you throw in the trunk as you head out to greener pastures of your own difficult sowing. 

And yes, a mom and daughter writing team is a charming enterprise in any setting – a published demonstration of matrilineal love, and a gift to the book’s marketers. 

On the other hand, We Are Resilient features in its introduction a photo of mom and daughter squaring off with fists raised, smiles touched with a hint of strain. In that photo the book’s editor is standing between Sissy and Tiffany – mom and daughter – with her own strenuous grin. Imagine a referee jumping in to separate the pugilists with a Standing Eight Count and suddenly interrupted by paparazzi. “Smile everybody!” 

This is a book about resilience whose authors, by their own acknowledgement, lived the book’s theme in its writing, coming through a mildly turbulent collaboration with a new mutual understanding. Yes, We are Resilient is a meta love letter to bumpy transcendence. The chapter on Hank alone, a Job-like character whose radiant, projectile love only increases with adversity, will park you in a new space.

“The beauty of it,” says daughter Tiffany, “is that there really was one common thread through all of the interviews. It wasn’t faith, it wasn’t optimism, it wasn’t attitude. I had a lot of nights where I was like, ‘What the heck did I do?’ It took this community for my mom and I to get this book done. Our own resilience and community made it happen.”

Grace Conquers

The opening conversation with the obstacle-mocking (and aptly named) Grace Fisher sets the tone for We Are Resilient. All the book’s proceeds go to the Grace Fisher Foundation, whose Inclusive Arts Clubhouse (La Cumbre Mall, 120 S Hope Ave.) is a free, welcoming space where artists of every ability can do their thing, connecting through music, dance, and the almost visible energy creative gatherings exude. 

Grace is the former high schooler (Go Dons) who, on the occasion of her own birthday party in 2014, was very suddenly and irrevocably attacked by a swiftly moving virus whose rampage, within hours of first mild onset, ultimately paralyzed Grace from the neck down. That was 12 years ago. Today Grace is as bowed and defeated as a sun-drenched meadow. 

“Of course I have new challenges, but we all have challenges. If you have the will, you’ve got to just figure out a way to make it happen. And I wake up super excited and happy to start my days. Honestly, probably every day I wake up and I’m happy.”

The template here is for the interviewer to exult for the record. “Her smile lights up the room!” and “Grace is so brave. SO BRAVE!” The mettle is in the CV, people. Between her having conceived and launched the foundation that bears her name, her gorgeous works on canvas (one of which Graces the cover of We Are Resilient; coincident with the August 13 event, her partial oeuvre will occupy their own gallery adjacent to the Faulkner), her UCSB degree in Music Composition, and her ambassadorship for creatives in our town, Grace is principally a businesswoman and expressionist dynamo. 

In conversation she is also possessed of a kind of amused lightness – a perceivable whimsy. I can well imagine Gracie – one arched eyebrow conveying innocence and light – rolling over my foot with that heavy-looking contraption she sits in and making it look like an accident. “Woops! Was that your foot, Jeff?” (I’ll admit we just met and I’m likely misjudging.) Her trials are neither a gaudy badge of honor nor performative “courage.” Grace Fisher is a woman on the move.

“I started this foundation close to 10 years ago now,” she says. Why? “When I was in high school, I would get invited to get-togethers and parties, and it was just a part of growing up. After my disability, I noticed I didn’t get invited to much. And so I was like, ‘Okay.’” The woman doesn’t suffer foolishness. “When I was in rehab initially, the arts were so good for bringing me back to a state of positivity. When I came back to Santa Barbara, I wanted to bring that joy of the arts and creation to other kids and other people with disabilities.” Grace’s positivism isn’t unalloyed. It’s real, and it’s tempered.

“I know that there’s something that is going to happen. I know some day someone around me is going to get sick and that’s going to be hard to face. But I feel like I’ve gone through a lot of hard things in my life. I know that I’ve come a long way.” Her expression is firm and unsmiling, but, yeah; there is that light.

“Letting go of what I thought my life was going to be, just being open to the possibilities, was empowering” she says.

Sissy Had a Couple Books in Her

Sissy Taran is sitting in a park in Ashland, Oregon. “There’s a pond in front of me with old growth trees,” she exults. “And I’m here with my 19-year-old granddaughter, Tiffany’s second child. She just returned from London where she went to school for a year. She’s madly in love with Shakespeare!” Sissy is electric with happy determination. (“Your mom is a firecracker!” I later mention to Tiffany. “Yeah, that’s one word,” Tiffany replies with a smile.) 

When Sissy, her husband Bernie, and their two high school-aged daughters moved from Beverly Hills to Santa Barbara (Tiffany is the big sister and was away at Law School), it was to be a yearlong tryout of the embraceable beach town. “It was a sabbatical. We left Beverly Hills and rented our house out for a year.” At the end of that period the family took a vote. “There were four votes,” Sissy says. “The three of us voted to remain and Bernie voted to go back to Beverly Hills for the ball games and his friends. He lost.” 

Bernie threw himself at their new home base, swapping Dodger and Ram games and UCLA for Friday night lights at Santa Barbara High and UCSB. “He became very, very active in Montecito. Bernie became president of MERRAG, became the treasurer of Santa Barbara High,” Sissy says. “He even ran the Snack Shack at the football games. We had a great life. I was very active in the PTA and in the Jewish community…” 

When in short order Bernie developed a fever and was swept away in hospital, Sissy was bereft. But this is a woman whose productive, reparative energies are fed by hardship. One day she saw the door ajar and walked into Rabbi Steve Cohen’s office. This may be viewed as an object lesson for busy Rabbis: close the office door till it clicks. She and the Rabbi ended up writing a book together, The Sun will Shine Again. The Rabbi had initially declined the offer.

““No, no, no, no, no. I don’t have time. We’ve got 400 families!’ Sissy relates Rabbi Cohen saying, adding ‘…of course now we have 900, but then we had 400 families. He said, ‘I don’t think I have the time for this.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s try.’” The book was a smash and led to two years of speaking tours for Sissy. When We Are Resilient emerged as an idea, Sissy knew the subject and the process. There was one fateful caveat.

“I’m a collaborator,” Sissy says definitively, “I do not like to do anything alone. And I thought, ‘okay, who do I want to do this with?’” Sissy was otherwise not riddled with questions on how to proceed.“I have a vision. I know the colors. I know what I want to do. I know the layout. I have everything, but I need somebody to do it with. And I called my daughter.”

“There’s so many books out there,” Tiffany says, “written by people…you know, What Do The 10 Most Successful People Do Five Times A Day? And I can’t relate to that. I’m not one of them. These people in our book cross all walks of life; gender, religion, race, identity, different kinds of trauma. And most of us are ordinary, extraordinary people. What I would say is, if you don’t read our book, talk to the five closest people around you and ask them their story.” And the story of Sissy and Tiffany writing a book together, of all things? The grown daughter laughs lightly, her eyes shining.

“When you truly take something on with somebody else, you learn a lot about yourself,” she says. “And this was not easy, nor for my mom. But when you stick to something, you move the needle a little bit every day. That’s the coolest thing of this. I never imagined we’d actually get to where we are.”  

Book Talk & Art Show: “We Are Resilient
Thursday, August 13, 5:30 pm to 7 pm
Central Library, Faulkner Gallery
(40 E. Anapamu St.)