Image Courtesy of: Anne Nygård

NOTES

Hello!

I do not have words yet... I have an experience...  I feel bizarrely sober... not quite somber but on the cusp of those two things.  I experience some quiet around my head.. hearing and noticing common things that I have tuned out or thoughts, emotions, sounds and sights that have gone unnoticed for a long time.

After I finished reading your book, I went outside on the porch and sat silently while whatever the heck you did to me with your memoir worked on me....   It's still working... doing something.... unveiling something that I know that I have experienced, but forgot.

I wish I was a poet so I could use words to express what's up for me right now after reading your book.   I literally just have an experience of being worked on... a little intruded upon... perhaps a little upset and seeing some truth that I've hidden from myself?

I love you and appreciate you including me as someone to read your memoir.  

Xav

Me again. I opened the PDF and realized it's a short book. I couldn't help myself but to dive right in.  Sally, this is beautiful. It feels like poetry to me. I recall when you were first talking to me about writing it back in 2020 and you weren't sure what shape it would take.  I love how it turned out and am so happy you are publishing it. 

Andrea

Reviews

Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Drummer Girl by Sally Dukes is a memoir that moves from a crisis in early childhood through to an adulthood molded by travel, work, illness, and loss. Born prematurely after World War II, she undergoes heart surgery at a New York hospital and returns home to strict limitations and recurring night terrors. Adolescence and college years are marked by financial strain, moves, and early jobs. In her twenties, she settles in Nantucket, runs a seasonal food business, and meets the man she marries. Together they attend meditation retreats and travel through Asia, including India and Burma, where she spends months in monastic practice. Back in the United States, Dukes transitions into psychology studies and raising a family, and the inevitable changes that come as we age.

I was drawn to Drummer Girl by Sally Dukes for a number of reasons. Like her, I traveled to all the same places, sans Burma, that she had in my young adulthood, and I also have the dreaded genetic marker that she describes later in her work. But this is Dukes' story, and it was great to see how someone with so much in common with me walked her path and where it took her. Dukes writes in language that is conversational and feels like a chat with a friend, and the descriptions of where she went are practically cinematic, including a climb in the Red Fort across the bank from the Taj Mahal. All of this is written with direct observation and quiet humor. Dukes neither instructs nor persuades. She records what happened, how she responded, and what remained afterward. That approach gives the memoir the relaxed feel of a life shaped by belief and human connection, and it is wonderful. Very highly recommended.

Hi Sally! I will be able to send you the endorsement tomorrow if all goes well. Your book is so deeply true. I love reading it.

Julia

Dear Sally,

Your memoir is spectacular!  You have written a gem.  Your writing is exquisite, taking the reader into a flow, a narrative, your life and the universality of existence.

Drummer Girl, Life After death, The Story of a Journey Home creates openings for questions held close to our souls while bringing perspectives, lived experiences allowing each reader to further into their own paths. No small feat!

Thank you for the opportunity to write an endorsement.  I am honored.

Love to you,

Katie

Sally — And by the way — all truth, what a read! I love personal stories, and especially the part where you write about your near-death experience. The way you describe that shift from fear to unconditional love was powerful (I've heard that many times from people, I think I even mentioned to Tim about that a few months back)  — I’ve always been fascinated by stories like that, and to have experienced it at such a young age is pretty crazy and wonderful at the same time. Anyway, really, really great.

Josh

I am sitting in the stillness of what feels like a place where time has stopped. Reading your exquisite life story has dropped me into a deep state of grace - and gratitude. Thank you for writing of your many sacred experiences. You deeply touched all aspects of my being: I feel peace, a heartwarming, yet throbbing, joy, and an intellectual curiosity.

Kate

Reviewed by Michele Sharpe January 16, 2026

Drummer Girl is a thoughtful memoir about unwinding inner turmoil and uncovering “answers to the numinous” through meditation.

Sally Dukes’s mystical memoir Drummer Girl interrogates the fallout of the open-heart surgery she underwent in her childhood.

In the 1950s, when cardiac surgery was in its infancy, Dukes was a toddler with a congenital heart defect. She experienced preverbal trauma on the operating table, initiating lifelong efforts to find the words to articulate her pain and the persistent echoes of her near-death experience. Alongside that work, the book touches on historical developments in life-saving cardiac surgery for children and the role of mindfulness meditation in self-healing.

Haunted by her trauma and the memory of “the clear light at the end of the dark tunnel,” Dukes undertook international explorations of death and consciousness. As the owner of a Nantucket café, she worked hard during the summers and was free to travel in the offseason. She went to Varanasi, India, along the banks of the Ganges, observing funeral rites and cremations out in the open, where death seemed to be treated as “a welcome relief from the physical body.” This was the first of many international destinations intended to unwind her inner turmoil and uncover “answers to the numinous” through meditation.

But this is not a travel memoir; its descriptions of places and people are secondary to its descriptions of what Dukes took from each experience. After more than a decade of searching, she determined that her childhood out-of-body experience could not be made tangible for others. She then turned to a more conventional, in-the-body solution to her perennial discontent.

A powerful aural image of the sounds made by Dukes’s struggling heart—“beat, swish, gurgle, gush”—is an early example of the book’s rhythmic prose, which adapts throughout the book to match the pace of events. Short sentences give a sense of urgency to passages about life-threatening occasions, while longer sentences are used in paragraphs drawing on medical research and those concerning meditation, tilting toward a contemplative mood.

The book’s structure is formal, with COVID-19–related grief functioning as bookends for a series of flashbacks and scenes that take place over a period of almost seventy years. There’s a similar bookending in the narrative strategy, which assumes a double perspective, shifting between Dukes as an adult and the viewpoint of “drummer girl,” her inner child. This strategy is effective at separating her childhood consciousness from her adult awareness; however, when the two perspectives are included in close proximity to one another, sometimes even in the same sentence, the artifice is apparent.

The book’s final vignettes before the second COVID-19 bookend are observations of people dying. Witnessed as external evidence of an afterlife, these offered Dukes a sort of comfort, helping to define and validate her childhood out-of-body experience. They are a soothing conclusion to a book that also includes a frenetic personal search for clarity.

An introspective memoir, Drummer Girl draws on a childhood experience of open-heart surgery to make larger spiritual connections.

FWIW, I was very moved by your life story and gathered wisdom & compassion. It was an honor truly to get to know someone I already admire on a much deeper level. Writing a book is hard! Congratulations on this accomplishment darlin. This was so powerful and emotional to read. It was a deeply spiritual experience and I'm grateful for the opportunity to spend time with a wise and ancient soul.

Cheryl

Dear Sally — First let me say how incredibly touching it was to receive this request and preview of your life’s work. It’s beyond beautiful and film worthy. My Dad was with me as I read. Thank you. 

Ushi