Forget Prayers, Bring Cake

Though at times it may seem impossible, we can heal with help from our friends and community– if we know how to ask. This heartrending, relatable account of one woman’s reckoning with loss is a guide to the world of self-recovery, self-love, and the skills necessary to meeting one's own needs in these times of pain– especially when that pain is suffered alone.

Grief is all around us. In the world of today it has become common and layered, no longer only an occasional weight. A book needed now more than ever, Forget Prayers, Bring Cake is for people of all ages and orientations dealing with grief of any sort professional, personal, romantic, familial, or even the sadness of the modern day. This book provides actions to boost self-care and self-worth; it shows when and how to ask for love and attention, and how to provide it for others. It shows that it is okay to define your needs and ask others to share theirs. In a moment in which community, affection, and generosity are needed more than ever, this book is an indispensable road map.

This book will be a guiding light to a healthier mental state amid these troubled times.

About the Author

Merissa Nathan Gerson is a New Orleans-based writer, professor and sex educator. Her written work has been seen in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Playboy , and Tablet among others. She was inherited trauma consultant for Amazon’s Emmy Award winning television show, Transparent, and continues to speak nationwide on sex, Judaism, LGBTQ inclusion in Jewish spaces, and the inheritance of trauma and memory.

She has been invited to lecture at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Georgetown Center for Jewish Life, and The Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle and her 2018 Eli Talk on Talmud and consent became KenMeansYes, a pulpit-based Jewish consent advocacy campaign. A member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and the American Association of Sexuality Educators Counselors and Trainers, Merissa thrives at the intersection of art, academia, sex, gender, and trauma theory.

She holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, CO where she studied Shamatha meditation in the Shambhala lineage. She is a certified yoga teacher in the Sivananda lineage, and has trained with Kohenet: Hebrew Priestess Institute, Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and with Rabbis James Jacobs Maisels and Jeffrey Roth in the practice of Jewish meditation.