REVIEW: Forest Walk on a Friday by Lynne Golodner

Reviewed by Diane Gottlieb

Singing saved my life, and I don’t say that lightly. As a sad and lonely child, I gained great comfort from belting out tunes into my hairbrush. I’d harmonize with the transistor radio, the boombox, the vinyl spinning round and round. While I’d always been able to hit the high notes, I spent my time in lower registers. I’d learned the word falsetto and thought the high notes were “false.”

Many years later, when I gave myself the gift of voice lessons, my Julliard-trained opera-singer teacher had me practice the scales, accompanying me on the piano. As her fingers moved higher and higher across the keys, they suddenly froze. “We’ve found a treasure in the attic,” she said. It was then, at 40, that I had finally found my voice.

“Finding your voice.” A complicated three-word phrase that means different things to different people, but we all know how it feels once we find it. Sometimes our voice appears suddenly—in an epiphany or a high note. Most often, though, voice is a gradual discovery, made by walking windy paths filled with detours, over many years.

In Forest Walk on a Friday: Essays on Love, Home and Finding My Voice at Midlife (Scotia Road Books; 2025), Lynne Golodner takes us with her down her path in a beautiful collection of essays.

For Golodner, the dual searches for home and voice are closely related. She feels in harmony with herself on the water in a kayak or hiking in the woods — often alone. It is in nature, away from her life’s usual hustle-bustle, where she can listen and learn. In “Still the Dandelions Come,” we see Golodner’s respect for the hardiest weeds and her surrender to the deer that has eaten the fruit of her labor in her garden: “I wondered if I could sit beside the deer and have a conversation. I’d like to talk with someone who just knows in her body how to live in this world.” I am not surprised by Golodner’s resonance with the natural world, as her essays are sensual, earthy. She writes about pleasure as well as pain, and, often, about the body.

Cycles fill her writing. While she moved across the country and visited many places across the globe, she is back now, living not far from where she grew up. She’s come full circle in her connection to religion, as well. In “Oysters” she writes about that journey: “Feeling like I didn’t belong among the people who’d raised me propelled me toward Orthodox Judaism … I thought following rules would make me acceptable to others. The real me was too intense, outspoken and brazen … that made me ‘too much’ for certain friends, family members and most boyfriends, who ultimately discarded me. So I gave myself up.”

After a long immersion into the world of Orthodox Judaism, Golodner divorced herself—both from her Orthodox husband and community—and returned to the lifestyle of her less structured, secular childhood. Golodner found new love with Dan, the man she soon married and who accepts her completely. She also came back to a ritual she had deeply missed: eating oysters with her dad.

Golodner’s dad is present in many of these pages, although he has passed in real life. In “Swimming: A Meditation,” we learn of his incurable blood cancer and the process, for Golodner, of living through the two years of his dying. Golodner’s father had always been the person she’d turn to for reassurance and advice. It is the pool and her bodily exertion that catalyze a dramatic realization: “Swimming infuses me with strength, clarity and determination like my conversations with Dad. I no longer need to hear his words to know that everything will be all right. In the absence of his voice, I listen my own.”

“Voice,” the final essay in the collection, begins, again, with the body: “I try to speak, and my voice catches, an acorn lodged in my throat.” Golodner has a polyp on her vocal chords, yet she is convinced the issue does not solely rest in the physical: “This isn’t the first time my faltering voice alerted me to an uncomfortable truth.” When Golodner was in her first year of her first marriage, her throat burned and she was, on three occasions, diagnosed with strep. The burning was also diagnostic of something else: “In intuitive medicine, getting sick in your throat means you feel you don’t have a voice.”

Golodner then shares a transformative moment she had on a rooftop in Bali as the guest writer/photographer at a yoga retreat. “You are enough, Lynne,” the instructor told her out of the blue. The words shifted something inside: “Standing in the open window, I wanted to stop telling other people’s stories and get to know my own …” Golodner heeded that rooftop message and the meaning behind it. She not only listens to her own voice now but helps others to listen to theirs, as she’s developed what she calls her “signature course” on writing: Finding Your Voice.

In the course of treatment for the polyp on her vocal cords, Golodner’s voice therapist told her that we are, generally, very hard on our voices. Golodner ends her closing essay with this: “So I’ll be quiet for a time and let my voice come through on the page, choosing my words to proclaim I am absolutely enough, and it is time to be heard.” Golodner is absolutely enough, and it is definitely time for her to be heard. There is so much beauty in these essays—in her sensuous sentences and also in the sharing of her deepest self. We see a woman, in Forest Walk on a Friday, who has claimed her worth and her right to share it. She is unapologetic. Fierce and warm, thoughtful and caring. Her voice carries. These essays sing.