Synopsis "Treading on Cobwebs: Poems"
On a cold, clear February morning in 2003, Mary Interlandi drove to the top floor of a parking garage in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, stepped off the edge, and ended her life. After nineteen years full of academic, artistic, and personal accomplishments- including being voted "Most Creative Senior" by her high school peers and early admittance to Brown University- Mary chose to end three years of devastating psychological suffering to, in her own words, "save her family from the burden of her care." In the ten years since Mary's death, her mother, Beth Interlandi, has sifted through Mary's countless journals and has compiled here twenty-one poems Mary wrote in the final years of her life. Treading on Cobwebs is as much a heart-breaking and revealing gathering of verse as it is an artifact of a young woman's journey from living to dying. In the beginning of one of her last poems, full of her beloved slam poetry rhymes and stream of consciousness, she wrote: "My heroes, friends, and family empower me to stand tall inside my identity, fill it out to each extremity and carry out my destiny, for I cannot do it alone...You are my chosen companions and my unavoidable fate, and I embrace you and define myself through you. I invoke you and I explore you. I shed my thick skin for you and let you into my pale, pink self..." All proceeds from the sales of this book will go to the two Endowments established in Mary's honor: The Interlandi-Interlochen Endowment Fund at University School of Nashville and Contemplative Minds: The Mary Interlandi '05 Lecture Fund at Brown University.
