Join us for a book launch, conversation and signing. Helen Tworkov, author and founding editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review discusses her wise and moving memoir, Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America with author Pico Iyer. Lotus Girl provides a space to learn more about the history of Buddhism in America; to hear Helen's reflections on her practice of Buddhism, informed by her interactions with thinkers and artists including the Dalai Lama and Richard Serra; and to consider the ways each of us can better understand and transform ourselves. 

This program is co-presented with the South Asian Journalists' Association (SAJA). Entry to the program also includes access to our latest exhibition, COAL + ICE, on view at Asia Society Museum until 6:30 p.m. 

“A vivid account of an amazing, lifelong spiritual odyssey by a woman who never took no for an answer.” 

—Lawrence Shainberg, author of Ambivalent Zen and Four Men Shaking

“This beautiful and moving self-portrait is filled with unexpected and marvelous juxtapositions. But as we learn that Helen Tworkov never stops questioning conventional perceptions or orthodoxy of any kind, it makes perfect sense that two of her closest friends are Pema Chödrön and Richard Serra; or that she knew not just Charles Mingus, but also John Cage; or that she divides her time between Manhattan, Buddhist monasteries in Nepal, and Cape Breton’s isolated coast. Through it all, Tworkov’s tenacious search for what’s real and what’s true will enrich anyone fortunate enough to read this important book.” —Laurie Anderson, artist

On Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America

As the daughter of an artist, Helen Tworkov grew up in the heady climate of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Yet from an early age, restless within the conventions of her own society, her disenchantment with the world energized a quest for a religion of greater meaning. 

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America (St. Martin’s Essentials | April 16, 2024), a new memoir by the founding editor of Tricycle magazine, opens with the 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning image of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk sitting in formal meditation as he burns to death after self-immolating to protest his government’s crackdown on the Buddhist clergy. “Within an inferno of his own making, Thich Quang Duc sat so still that the whole world stopped,” writes Tworkov. “When it moved again, to me it never looked quite the same.” It is at this moment that Tworkov realizes that radically different states of mind truly existed, stirring up questions from her childhood, and initiating her own attempts to integrate political and spiritual liberation. At the age of twenty-two, she set off for Japan, then traveled through Cambodia, India, and eventually to Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal.

Today, Buddhism’s influence is ubiquitous: it prevails in new psychotherapies, neuroscience research into the mind and the brain, equestrian training, performance art, and the practice of mindfulness and meditation in classrooms, prisons, hospitals, and corporate board rooms. But when Tworkov became interested in Buddhism, few Americans were acquainted with the ideals of the East. Set against the arresting cultural backdrop of the sixties and their legacy, this intimate self-portrait depicts Tworkov’s search for a true home as she interacts with renowned artists and spiritual luminaries including the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, Joseph Goldstein, Bernie Glassman, Charles Mingus, Elizabeth Murray, and Richard Serra. Interweaving experience, research, and revelation, Tworkov explores the relationship between Buddhist wisdom and American values, presenting a singular look at the developing landscape of Buddhism in the West. “My life in Buddhism started with the confusion and rebel spirit that defined the counterculture of the 1960s,” she writes. “While spiritual narratives often prioritize lightning bolt insights, I wanted to add to the history of Buddhism in America something of the impolite, naïve, and despairing side of this wondrous journey.” Lotus Girl offers insight not only into Tworkov’s own search for the truth but also the ways each of us can better understand and transform ourselves.

Lotus Girl ends with the world in the grip of political and climate catastrophes, and here the burning monk again becomes a haunting reflection of staying steady in a world on fire. 

Helen Tworkov is the founding editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the first and only independent Buddhist magazine; and the author of Zen in America: Profiles of Five Teachers; and co-author, with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, of In Love with the World: A Monks’s Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying. She first encountered Buddhism in Japan and Nepal during the 1960s, and has studied in both the Zen and Tibetan traditions. She began studying with Mingyur Rinpoche in 2006 and currently divides most of her time between New York and Nova Scotia.

Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books of fiction and non-fiction, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Cuban revolution and the XIVth Dalai Lama to Islamic mysticism and the art of stillness. His four talks for TED have received more than 11 million views so far.  His most recent book, The Half Known Life,  explores the idea of paradise as it comes to us in often difficult places, from Iran and North Korea to Jerusalem, Kashmir, Ladakh and Varanasi.