grief

April 1, 2021

Book 278: The Possibilities

“Afterward, I had touched my abdomen. I pinched my skin. I thought it was possible that that moment, that particular choice, would hurt me for the rest of my life. Or maybe it wouldn’t. I would never know. Everything just becomes a part of you. Gets woven into the tapestry. The next day was an ordinary day.”

Dates read: November 22-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

Even though it’s now been nearly a decade since I practiced law, both of my parents still want me to go back to it. I feel extremely comfortable with my decision to leave it behind. I was so miserable, and while a significant portion of that misery was related to the exact situation I was in, I figured out enough about the general situation of your average litigator to know that it wasn’t for me. Some people thrive under constant pressure, find it exciting and stimulating to never know what the next day will bring. Not me. I crack. Before it was over, I was crying in the shower every morning, terrified of what might be facing me at the office that day. Getting out was 100% the right call and I am very happy doing what I do now.

My parents just want the best for me. They want to see me put that legal education that I paid for to full use, to get to the earning potential that would make it easier to pay off those student loans. They want a life of success and comfort for me because they love me. But children have a way of turning into their own people. In Kaui Hart Hemming’s The Possibilities, reporter Sarah St. John is struggling with the recent loss of her son, Cully. In his early 20s, he’d recently moved back in with his mom in their hometown of Breckinridge when he was caught in an avalanche while out on the slopes and killed. A few months after his death, as Sarah is trying to figure out how to start living in, she finds herself confronting the reality that she might not have known him as well as she thought.

First, she and her best friend, Suzanne, find evidence that Cully was selling pot when they’re cleaning out his room. But more importantly, a young woman called Kit turns up on Sarah’s doorstep out of nowhere. She’s pretending to be making some extra cash shoveling snow, but it turns out she was the girl Cully was seeing when he died. And she’s pregnant. As his family (Sarah, her father Jack, and Sarah’s ex/Cully’s father, Billy) prepares for a final celebration of his life, Kit’s pregnancy and uncertainty about what to do about it stirs up powerful emotions.

Hemmings clearly has an area of interest in her writing: much like the Kings in The Descendants, the St. Johns in The Possibilities are a family coping with the loss of a loved one in a setting of intense natural loveliness. Each family has a quirky member who serves as empathetic comic relief (foul-mouthed child Scottie in Descendants, here QVC-addicted Jack), and each family deals with an outsider connected to the loved one as they grieve. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think it quite fair to compare two of an author’s works quite so closely, but the parallels between these books are so strong that it doesn’t seem avoidable to do so. Hemmings is far from the only author who writes books that feel like variations on a theme (Jane Austen, for example, wrote wonderful books that aren’t actually all that different from each other, plot-wise), but for these two to directly follow each other makes the feeling that this is a bit of a retread even stronger.

And to be honest, of the two, this one is worse. A lot of the elements feel a little half-baked, like Sarah and Suzanne’s friendship, and the tension between Suzanne’s desire for sympathy for going through a divorce and Sarah’s continuing grief. And while the decision Kit wrestles with about her pregnancy is obviously supposed to be the source of great dramatic tension, I never really felt a great deal of suspense about how it would play out. The book does have highlights: Hemmings writes lovely, poignant prose, and for the most part she builds compelling characters and lets them shine. This is a perfectly pleasant book, and if I hadn’t read and loved The Descendants before I picked it up, I would probably have liked it more. But it suffered for the inevitable comparison, and I’d recommend the other much more heartily.

One year ago, I was reading: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Two years ago, I was reading: All the President’s Men

Three years ago, I was reading: Freedom

Four years ago, I was reading: Innocent Traitor

Five years ago, I was reading: The Group

November 5, 2020

Book 258: Paint It Black

“She felt like old people who forgot what shoes were for, each gesture calling meaning into question—unbuttoning a button, breathing. Movement slowed to half-speed, quarter speed, as if the air had thickened. She could take nothing for granted, her hand on her shirt, her ability to keep the floor underfoot.”

Dates read: August 29- September 3, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Although most people, when asked what kind of baby they’re hoping for, will say “a healthy one”, I suspect most actually have a gender preference. I think a lot of people hope for the same as themselves…if you’re a lady, it’s probably easier to think about raising a girl, and vice versa. And I think others think about the ease of raising. I’ve heard that girls are “easier” until they hit the teenage years, and then boys are. And then there’s the idea that while girls “leave” your family eventually to start their own, boys are always a part of their parents’ family.

It’s this last, I think, that often drives the stereotypical tension between wives and mothers-in-law. But there’s a difference between the usual case of being a bit possessive of one’s little boy, and emotional enmeshment that’s unhealthy. In Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black, Josie Tyrell is intimidated by her boyfriend Michael’s mother Meredith. She hears his stories of the way Meredith kept him close to her after his parents got divorced when he was a child, and the world he grew up in as the son of a leading concert pianist who traveled the world is wildly different than the one she grew up in and ran away from, on the wrong side of the tracks in an industrial city in southern California. They meet in Los Angeles, where Josie’s working as an art model after dropping out of high school, and Michael goes to escape the Harvard education he never really wanted. They fall in love, rent a house together…and then Michael commits suicide.

His death comes at the very beginning of the novel, and over the course of its 400 pages we get the story of his relationship with Josie, and with his mother, as well as the two women’s gradually intensifying connection after he’s gone. It’s tempting for Josie to play along with what Meredith wants, to give in to the ease and glamour of being a replacement for Michael. But there’s a sense of a fly being drawn into a spider’s web. Paint It Black is a study of grief, and the ways even the ones we think we share everything with remain mysterious to us, and the power of narcissists to prey on the vulnerable.

Clearly the relationships between mothers and daughters are something Janet Fitch finds compelling, as it was the focus of her big hit White Oleander and is explored in its own way here, with Josie becoming a kind of surrogate daughter to Meredith, who upgrades her from Michael’s girlfriend to his fiancee for an air of legitimacy. The terms of this particular relationship, ostensibly between adults although with Meredith holding all the money and most of the obvious power, is an unusual one, and I thought Fitch wrote Josie’s grief well enough that we could understand and empathize with how she becomes ensnarled in it. Speaking of writing, it’s really the star of this book. I was constantly tabbing passages to come back to, that captured a feeling in an interesting and new way. It’s lush and rich and evocative.

It could have used some editing, though. The book’s biggest issue is that it’s simply too long for the amount of material it actually has. It feels like it drags in the middle because it’s just Josie mourning, and drinking, and taking pills, and being unable to help herself from being in contact with Meredith even though she knows she shouldn’t be. And while I did very much enjoy the writing, it did at times feel circuitous and self-indulgent. The characters are not as well-developed or interesting as those in White Oleander, so if you’re picking up this because you loved that, be prepared for a less fully realized novel. It’s got merit, and if it seems interesting to you it’s not a waste of your time to pick it up, but it’s not a must-read.

One year ago, I was reading: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Two years ago, I was reading: In Defense of Food

Three years ago, I was reading: La Belle Sauvage

Four years ago, I was reading: The Queen of the Night

Five years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

March 21, 2019

Book 173: The Year of Magical Thinking

“If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?”

Dates read: August 29-31, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: National Book Award, The New York Times bestseller

I’m very lucky in many respects, and one of them is this: my entire nuclear family is more or less healthy and very much alive. My parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my husband…I’ve never experienced that kind of loss. My mom had lost both of her parents by the time she was my age, which just blows my mind. Even now, I don’t feel prepared to lose either of my parents, much less both of them. I know this will change, and one day I’ll find myself having to say goodbye to people that I love dearly, but for now I’m grateful.

I was reminded of just how lucky I am when I read Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she recounts an incredibly terrible time: while their adult daughter Quintana is fighting for her life in the hospital, a normal-seeming winter cold somehow having progressed into pneumonia, septic shock, and coma, Joan and her husband John come home, and while she’s getting things ready for dinner, he suddenly keels over, dead after a massive heart attack. She doesn’t know that right at the moment it happens, of course. All she knows is that he falls, is non-responsive, she calls an ambulance, they try to resuscitate him, and then off to the ER. She finds out shortly after she arrives that he’s gone. Forty years of marriage, and then he’s gone just like that.

But she can’t just focus dealing with the loss of her constant companion for decades (as professional writers, they both worked from home). Her daughter is still comatose, and Joan has to break the news to her not once but twice (she forgets when she falls back into a coma after being told the first time). Quintana does seem to recover, the funeral happens, and she flies back to California with her own husband…only to collapse again on her way out of the airport. Joan leaves her NYC apartment to head to LA to be there for her daughter, and is constantly buffeted by memories of her family’s early, happy years in the area. Eventually Quintana recovers again, and Joan returns home, wrapping up her book a year and a day after her husband’s death.

On the surface, there’s very little in Joan Didion’s life that I can relate to: she and her husband lived at a level of financial security where they made regular trips to Paris (their quibbling over what turned out to be their last trip, taken at John’s insistence because he had a vague feeling that it might be his last chance is something Joan relates), they lived in LA for a time to write screenplays, they take daily walks in Central Park. And like I’ve said, I’ve never lived through the kind of awful experiences she recounts in this book. But she’s an extremely talented writer, so her words spoke to me and tugged at my heart. She doesn’t just tell you that grief takes you around in circles, she has motifs in her writing that pop up over and over again, taking you on that journey with her. You feel her agony when she thinks she’s plotted her route around LA when she’s there with Quintana to avoid anything that would remind her of when her husband was alive but she finds that she didn’t plan carefully enough and the fragile scar tissue she’s built up is battered by waves of memory.

It feels odd to say that I “enjoyed” reading a memoir about profound grief. But I found it incredibly compelling and difficult to put down even though it was hard to read. She really takes the reader on a journey with her. Knowing that even though she was alive at the end of the book, Quintana died shortly thereafter, made its impact even greater. I’d never read any of Didion’s work before, but I picked up one of her novels and two of her essay collections after reading this book, because I wanted to read more of her writing. I’d recommend this book to anyone that feels like picking it up.

Tell me, blog friends…do you have to relate to a memoirist’s experiences to get into their book?

One year ago, I was reading: Possession

Two years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Three years ago, I was reading: Private Citizens

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