As the daughter of an artist, Helen Tworkov grew up in the heady climate of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Yet from an early age, restless within the conventions of her own society, her disenchantment with the world energized a quest for a religion of greater meaning. 

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America (St. Martin’s Essentials | April 16, 2024), a new memoir by the founding editor of Tricycle magazine, opens with the 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk sitting in formal meditation as he burns to death after self-immolating to protest his government’s crackdown on the Buddhist clergy. “Within an inferno of his own making, Thich Quang Duc sat so still that the whole world stopped,” writes Tworkov. “When it moved again, to me it never looked quite the same.” It is at this moment that Tworkov realizes that radically different states of mind truly existed, stirring up questions from her childhood, and initiating her own attempts to integrate political and spiritual liberation. At the age of twenty-two, she set off for Japan, then traveled through Cambodia, India, and eventually to Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal.

Today, Buddhism’s influence is ubiquitous: it prevails in new psychotherapies, neuroscience research into the mind and the brain, equestrian training, performance art, and the practice of mindfulness and meditation in classrooms, prisons, hospitals, and corporate board rooms. But when Tworkov became interested in Buddhism, few Americans were acquainted with the ideals of the East. Set against the arresting cultural backdrop of the sixties and their legacy, this intimate self-portrait depicts Tworkov’s search for a true home as she interacts with renowned artists and spiritual luminaries including the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, Joseph Goldstein, Bernie Glassman, Charles Mingus, Elizabeth Murray, and Richard Serra. Interweaving experience, research, and revelation, Tworkov explores the relationship between Buddhist wisdom and American values, presenting a singular look at the developing landscape of Buddhism in the West. “My life in Buddhism started with the confusion and rebel spirit that defined the counterculture of the 1960s,” she writes. “While spiritual narratives often prioritize lightning bolt insights, I wanted to add to the history of Buddhism in America something of the impolite, naïve, and despairing side of this wondrous journey.” Lotus Girl offers insight not only into Tworkov’s own search for the truth but also the ways each of us can better understand and transform ourselves.

Lotus Girl ends with the world in the grip of political and climate catastrophes, and here the burning monk again becomes a haunting reflection of staying steady in a world on fire.