Scarsdale Schoolmates Save Each Other’s Lives Through Writing

The authors were Co-Captains of the Scarsdale High School JV Field Hockey team in 1979.Two friends, who grew up in Scarsdale, found themselves confronting live-shattering circumstances: the death of a child by suicide and the diagnosis of a glioblastoma brain tumor. Engulfed by pain, they asked each other: “What if? What if we just write to each other? Anything. Just write.”

Over the course of the next year, these two women—one in New York City, the other in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado—embarked on a deliberate correspondence to rescue themselves and each other from overwhelming grief. Their words would become a lifeline and the inspiration for this new memoir: Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal.

As the months passed, the act of writing and bearing witness to one another transforms each woman’s journey through terrible loss into a courageous affirmation of resilience and of lives well lived.

“We’ve been friends for over forty-five years, since high school,” Chris and Jane explain, remembering with humor their experiences as the awkward and unlikely co-captains of the Scarsdale High School JV Field Hockey team. Both women went on to attend Wellesley College outside of Boston. “But our adult lives took very different trajectories, and part of what this epistolary project allowed us to explore, as we reckoned with grief and mortality, were those experiences that we all share, that make us who we are as human beings: the desire for love, the challenge of navigating close personal relationships, the reality of grief and loss, the longing for a life of meaning.

“We have loved these months of corresponding with each other for the simple yet life affirming feeling of having someone to walk with in the deep woods. We have come to believe that the conversation between us could resonate with others. And if this is so, then that is grace.”

Flynn and Holbrook will host an author Q and A and book signing on Sunday March 1, 2026, from 2 -3:30 pm at the Church of St. James the Less, 10 Church Lane, Scarsdale.

About the Authors:

Jane Flynn. Jane received her BA from Wellesley College, and her JD from Harvard Law School. She left family, friends and Jane Flynnprofession behind to follow her future husband to Athens, Greece, in 1990. She learned Greek and, over the next thirty years, raised two sons while navigating the services to support her younger son with autism, cofounding an autism advocacy nonprofit and serving on the board of the Mediterranean Garden Society. Jane returned to New York in late 2020 following the death of her younger son by suicide. Antiphon is her first published work.

Christina Holbrook. Christina graduated with a BA from Wellesley College and spent most of her career in New York City involved in the printing and publishing of art and photography books. She now lives in Breckenridge, Colorado, with her husband Alan. Christina has worked as a columnist for the Summit Daily newspaper in Colorado, and her short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals. All the Flowers of the Mountain, her first novel, was published by Sunroom Studios Christina Holbrookin 2022 and has received the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Romance, the 2023 IPPY Bronze Medal for Romance, and the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Fiction
Audiobook.

Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal
Book Publisher: Ikaros Books
Available through bookstores and from Amazon.com.

Attend a Q and A and book signing with the authors on Sunday March 1, 2026, from 2-3:30 pm at the Church of St. James the Less, 10 Church Lane, Scarsdale.