Tick -tock...counting down to Saturday March 24th! 1-3 PM Hastings Books Murfreesboro TN Book Launch!

Jimmy's story --Closing The Gate

The UNTOLD Story of the HEavens Gate Cult --a personal side divulged as the 15th anniversary of the mass suicide nears.....

the loft of the apartment where Jimmy died ...

following his Class to the Next Level...

Book Launch Cake for Closing The Gate!

News-Closing The Gate, by William Visher

William Visher of Visher Ink and Closing The Gate

Author Deb Simpson recalls life of brother and member of Heaven’s Gate cult in new book

Murfreesboro author and Tennessee Writer’s Alliance president Deb Simpsonhas dealt with her fair share of tragedy and has decided to deal with it on the printed page. She has written “Closing the Gate: Inside Heaven’s Gate”, a first person account of life with her brother, Jimmy, who was a member of the Heaven’s Gate cult. It is due out this March which coincides with the fifteenth anniversary of the event. While he was not actually in Rancho Santa Fe, CA on March 26, 1997, he did take his own life just five weeks later on May 13.

Writer Simpson has also penned “One Moment, One Memory, One Motion, “a memoir in poetic form about a young girl who endured physical and sexual abuse, and how the presence of one person in her life enabled her to reach beyond the shame, to a place of spiritual healing and joy.”

Advance Review for Closing the Gate:

” Deb Simpson’s familial voices ring with authenticity, call outto us from the pages of Closing the Gate, and pull the readerinto the midst of a deeply troubled family where Simpson’sconversational tone insists that we pay attention. She writeswith great courage and honesty in examining Jimmy’s plight:his dream of a place to call home, his tumble into the world ofa cult, and the inevitable downward spiral that his lonely lifetakes. She causes us to examine and reflect on the crucialdevelopmental years and every child’s yearning to belong.

Susan Ashley Michael, author of

• Crossing The Bridge of Sighs
  
• Toys in the Sand: Recovering Childhood Memories inLakeville, Massachusetts

See the You Tube promo Here: “>Closing the Gate trailer

Advance Reader Book Review -Closing The Gate

CLOSING THE GATE
Book Review by Teresa Belardes

“Closing the Gate” by Deb Simpson
For most of us, the headlines regarding the Mass Suicide of the thirty-six “Heaven’s Gate” cult members in Rancho Santa Fe, Ca. in 1997 was a sad curiosity. For Author Deb Simpson, it became up close and personal when her now adult, baby brother Jimmy, became collateral damage, his dead body discovered five weeks later in Atlanta Georgia. This, his second attempt to follow “those who went on ahead’, at last for him, successful.

This is a page turner of a story that manages to show clearly, the many facets of the characters who shaped the author’s life and that of her brother. It is a testament to their grandmother with whom she spent a few early years, that she was able to come away with enough tools to enable her to make different choices than the narrow possibilities that would inevitably be all that were available to her brother, after a childhood of loneliness and neglect. It paints a vivid case picture for the argument gauging  ‘Nature versus Nurture’

This author has managed, through her grief, to tell the poignant and tragic story of a childhood bereft of the safety and security of the traditional family at the hands of a mother and father who can only be described in hindsight as wholly unfit to parent, but whose journey is as fascinating as it is doomed. With these two, the dynamics that are at play are as intricate as the voices are strong, and everyone in their orbit comes away with at least a partial ticket to their ship wreck.

Deb’s detailed and appraising effort to sort out the path of a life that would lead to such a tragic end, results in a book that is at once a tribute and memorial to her brother, a soul search for the reader, and a call to arms for recognizing the utter importance of the early childhood years as a foundation for a well-rounded and fully formed adulthood. Might it also be a conscious or unconscious attempt to protect all the young and innocent souls that come after?
Probably. 
Successful? 
I hope so.

Closing the Gate is simply and frankly written. The author pulls you into her story and doesn’t let you go. In fact, you will be thinking about this one long after you close the book.

ISBN Paperback ;978-0-9848968-0-6
ISBN Hardcover 978-0-9848968-1-3
Available March 2012 -bookstores and online booksellers 

from Piney D Press