A Literary Memoir
The Weight
of Presence
"What it costs to remain present to suffering that is not yours,
and what it gives back."
"What it costs to remain present to suffering that is not yours,
and what it gives back."
The Weight of Presence begins with a birth certificate. In the margin, a father's handwriting: non reconnu par le père. Not recognized by the father. Frédéric cannot yet read it. His body understands anyway.
What follows is a life lived at the edges of belonging: the Vosges mountains of eastern France, the streets of Paris, a Texas ranch at dawn, the colonias straddling the Mexico-US border, the high desert of New Mexico, the state hospital hallways of Nevada, and eventually San Antonio, where Frédéric would spend decades sitting with people at their worst hours and their most invisible.
Structured around the Medicine Wheel's four cardinal directions, this autofiction refuses the arc from wound to recovery, from broken to whole. It holds something harder instead: that the child who survived and the clinician who accompanies others occupy the same circle, the same time, the same truth. Wound and wisdom are not sequential. They are simultaneous.
The Weight of Presence is a memoir about what we carry before we have words for it, and what becomes possible when we stop trying to set it down.
The French edition, La Parole Silencieuse, is in preparation.
Order on AmazonBorn near the Vosges mountains in eastern France, Frédéric J. Courtois came to social work through the long way, immigration, language, the slow erosion and reconstruction of belonging. He has spent two decades working at the edges of systems that fail the people who need them most.
He is Executive Director of San Antonio Nexus Connection (SANC), a street-based harm reduction organization, and the creator of Nexus365 Community Capital, a professional infrastructure platform for street outreach workers.
The Weight of Presence is his first book.
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Professional author photograph available for editorial use. Please include photo credit when publishing.
A Publishers Weekly BookLife review is forthcoming. Link will be posted here upon publication.
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