Razed by TV Sets by Jason McCall

In “My Dad Still Watches the NFL,” the opening essay of Jason McCall’s collection Razed by TV Sets, the prose is shot in bursts, every sentence beginning with the phrase “This is about,” aside from a handful of occasions where the reader is told the opposite: “But it’s not about that.” What initially seems terse and truncated moves ever closer to completion with each addition: “This is about a job. This is about how hard it is for some of us to get a job. . .This is about how it feels like we all got a good job when one of us gets a good job.” The writing continually billows and morphs, expands and contracts. McCall returns to this technique repeatedly throughout the collection; what begin as shallow breaths become deeper and more meditative with each iteration. Stylistically, it is no surprise that the author would employ anaphora, given his background as a poet with several collections to his name. Still, the foundation of McCall’s first book of prose is built on repetition, and yet nothing about it feels repetitive. Instead, the tactic acts as a compass, a way to navigate through seemingly antipodal content, a needle always pointing toward some broadly specific version of the truth.

The collection is, ostensibly, about popular culture. About celebrity. But really, each essay provides a new lens through which to view all kinds of subject matter, perhaps none more than illness, aging, and death. McCall also uses celebrity in an uncanny way here, as the famous folks who grace the pages of this book are not lathered in praise for their apparent greatness, but rather lauded for their tenacity, their grit, their willingness to live to the fullest, even—as is the case with WWE wrestler Eddie Guerrero—to their ultimate peril.  But this is not just about McCall’s fandom of legends and underdogs from the NBA, or the NFL, the WWE, or the music industry. It’s about how these subjects intertwine with his own unraveling, trips to the psychiatric unit brought on by those nagging thoughts of suicide some of us know too well. It’s about the author’s own struggle to make sense of a world where nothing makes sense. And yet, he draws lines between disparate ideas in a way that turns the nonsensical into logic.

I generally try to leave myself out entirely when discussing another author’s work, as my ability to relate (or not relate) with the material is usually of no consequence. But I believe it’s somewhat relevant to note that I, too, have been locked up in psychiatric facilities for suicidal ideation and behavior. McCall’s essay, “The New Transported Man,” is easily some of the best writing on the subject I’ve ever read. Like the rest of the book, it is authentic and unflinching. Suicide is a fraught and frightening subject most people avoid, but it requires deep consideration for those of us who don’t have that option. McCall sums this up in one perfect sentence: “My mind is divided on suicide in the same way some Christian denominations are divided on the idea of sin.” What follows is an opening into the author’s experience with what he calls a “second birth,” and in a text riddled with dates by a person who seems obsessed with them, the author writes: “November 13, 2005. That’s the only day that matters and the only day that will ever matter for me.” That’s the day McCall decided not to kill himself.

One of the most remarkable features of this book is its author’s ability to tie threads between himself and the stars highlighted, shedding new light on both his own experience and that of the celebrity. For instance—had someone asked me what I thought of Lil Wayne’s fifth album in Tha Carter series, I would have been honest: I never listened to it. I truly enjoyed Wayne’s earlier work, but he had become a punchline on the internet, and so I (wrongly) assumed his later music wasn’t worth listening to. This is, in part, the impetus for the essay “Tha Carter V Means the South’s Not Dead, Either.” While the world pokes fun, the internet abuzz with punchlines about the aging artist’s choice to tour with pop-punkers Blink 182, McCall comes to his defense—only not in the expected, ‘he was a legend in his day’ kind of way. Rather, McCall finds something truly noble in Wayne’s attempt, as the artist hunts for—and finds, according to the author—some earlier version of himself. The piece is so compelling I gave Tha Carter V a true listen, and he’s right: it’s full of great flows and personal storytelling, much like Wayne’s earlier output. But convincing the reader of this does not seem to be what McCall is ultimately after. “Wayne is still alive,” he reports. That alone is something to cherish.

Wayne’s journey toward reclaiming himself represents one of the book’s most revisited themes: work. The work it takes to grapple with massive existential questions; the work it takes to simply exist as a Black man in the United States. In “Oscar Grant’s America,” an essay that surrounds the film Fruitvale Station, McCall writes, “The movie is a study in endurance, and endurance is an American virtue. . . However, endurance is more than a virtue in the black community. Endurance. Grind. Hustle. They’re just different names for the god worshipped in ‘We Shall Overcome,’ Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ and Tupac’s ‘Changes.” The author goes on to examine the impossible position that America’s inherent and structural lie of equality puts the Black community in, especially the double standard applied to young Black men. But as the piece closes, McCall shifts focus, highlighting a tender moment while exiting the theatre; he and two young men who “could have been cover models for a Bill O’Rielly op-ed on wild black boys” hover, for just a moment, in that liminal space reserved for vulnerability. For grief.

There is an ineffable quality to this book that I have been trying (and failing) to put my finger on; the word “nuance” kept coming to mind, but language that vague and overused doesn’t cut it. Fortunately, McCall has no shortage of prose that captures what I’m grasping for: “Honest people make the best liars. I am a very honest person. I am a very good liar.” This is, on its face, a contradictory statement. And yet, by the end of “The New Transported Man,” it doesn’t feel like a contradiction at all. The book is predicated on the often-contradictory nature of existence, on honesty, on structural lies and unwitting lies and personal secrets, on trying to sort and differentiate one from the others, all while acknowledging that “even the truth is its own type of fiction.” The steady beat that drives this book is built on an acknowledgment that “the truth” often requires amendments, as do so many things. That’s what Jason McCall manages to do in myriad ways in this fabulous collection—amend sentences, concepts, truth, memory, and legacy, while leaving room, when the need inevitably arises, for future repairs.

Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries by Jeremy B. Jones

Jeremy Jones seeks solid ground in his new hybrid work of nonfiction, part biography, part memoir, part detective story, part ghost story. Readers of Cipher will recognize Jones’ pull toward his Blue Ridge Mountain family land that pulses through his first memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014), along with the thoughtful approach to Appalachian—and American—history through a personal lens. But this new book also yearns for a narrative solid ground and the way it can make a meaningful whole of disparate parts, and for the answers to be found in genetic coding about who we are and who we might become.

When Jones learns of his nineteenth-century ancestor’s diaries written in code, he secures a copy decoded in the 1970s by the retired NSA codebreaker, Nathaniel Browder. Browder came into possession of these diaries penned in the early 1800s after a man happened upon the notebooks in a box on the curb in front of a Wadesboro, North Carolina house slated for demolition in 1975.  Suspecting the diaries to be valuable, the man sought appraisals from historical societies and archivists until one archivist handed them off to the cryptanalyst Browder whose interest in history started him on a six-year decoding project that became The Enciphered Diaries of William Thomas Prestwood, purchased decades later from Amazon for eighty bucks by Jones (Prestwood’s great-great-great-great grandson).

Jones soon becomes obsessed. He pores over Prestwood’s diaries in office hours between his classes, shows the dirty parts to family members like a teen, digs in archive after archive to contextualize the private life on the page, writes Prestwood unanswerable letters, spits in a tube and phones possible distant cousins while waiting to pick up his sons from school.  His obsession mirrors Prestwood’s, who is fanatical for the elusive would-be paramour Mary Norwood and, later in life, for veins of gold in the North Carolina mountains. These “pathetic little books”—as Browder calls them—say nothing and everything in terse facts with no reflection or emotion. To Jones, they’re “like off-brand Moleskines,” twenty-eight handsewn books that divulge secrets of mistresses and lovers and female anatomy, but they are more log than diary, with little commentary beyond a heart drawn in the margin.

Brief spondees abound in the Prestwood logs: “Went school”; “Got sick”; “Kill’d bull”; “Housed corn”; “Hell fuss.” But such skeletal accounts give rise to invention and queries and what-ifs. Prestwood records when he gets drunk and when the snow is deep and when he meets one of his dozen mistresses in the hayloft, but he does not mention his father’s death, or the name of the child birthed by the woman he enslaves, a child likely his. Are the omissions intentional? Is the concision suggestive of shame? Jones asks, “Is the minimal black text the story and the whiteness the backdrop, or the other way round? Is what’s unsaid—what’s undone—more representative than any recorded action? Is what I can’t know more revealing than what I do? What William do I see when I foreground the silence, the absence, the negative space instead of the text?”

Much of that negative space is filled with Prestwood’s complicated relationship with slavery.  Researching American slavery requires its own deciphering; Jones skillfully pieces together his ancestor’s enmeshment from archives of letters, bills of sale, court proceedings.  Prestwood decidedly rejects plantation life, hides an enslaved man on the run, yet routinely rapes an enslaved woman “gifted” to him, probably fathering her four children. White Americans with roots in mountain poverty often hold to the self-righteous view that our family trees are not entangled with slavery, though being too poor to own another person did not necessarily mean unwillingness to do so, if the means had been there. We often hope backwards into our pasts, picture ancestors “on the right side of history.” Jones is honest about the ancestral story he would like to be true, and also about the mostly-disappointing story that he is piecing together. He is also honest about the murkiness of his own project and why he’s conducting it: To what extent is DNA relevant to how we live our lives? Is it instructive to know that one’s great-great-great-great-grandfather made cider and sowed oats and witnessed a woman hang? Instructive to learn that he likely sold his children?

“‘What kind of work are you doing there?’” asks a technician fixing the internet connection while our narrator studies court documents on his computer screen. Jones considers saying, “You sound like you’re from here. Who are your people? What do you know about them? About their pasts? Their sins?” Or he knows he could simply say, “I don’t know.” Instead, he changes the subject.

Cipher means not only a way to crack a code or method of coding, but also, Jones reminds us at the start of the book, a person without “weight, worth, or influence,” a worthless nobody. That’s how the NASA cryptanalyst saw William Prestwood, an “Everyman,” or a nobody that can stand in for folks on the ground at that juncture in history between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Prestwood presents himself to Jones as a cipher of all three meanings. This ancestor, in his unreadability, becomes a way for Jones to read his own life, which also gives rise to the hybrid structure of the book.

Roughly following the chronology of Prestwood’s life, Jones animates those terse lines and fills in the gaps with meticulous research, but he also dramatizes key moments in history when America is still trying to define itself, British pressures are not done with, and key events, like the slave revolt led by Nat Turner, are leading the new country toward its Civil War. These are moments that rumble between the lines of the diaries. Jones also weaves in achronological personal strands, such as his move back home with his wife and family to North Carolina after over a decade away: now he and his wife daily see people they went to high school with; they’re “feeling around for the line between intimacy and claustrophobia.” Another strand that threads throughout the book is an interrogation of American masculinity “born out of revolution.” He pulls from thinkers, such as the sociologist Michael Kimmel, exploring the self-made man. What does independence mean in an interdependent family? Is the whole point of parenting to ensure your sons won’t need you? How does one responsibly raise two White middle-class boys who are heir to privilege? Jones also decodes the eerie historical resonances between the xenophobia rampant in our contemporary U.S. (with the uptick in Confederate flags flying in his home state) and that of Andrew Jackson’s forced displacement of Native Americans in Prestwood’s lifetime.

When braiding narratives, the craft of hybrid memoir-biography-history lies in discerning between generative, illuminating interruptions and those that derail narrative momentum or splinter insight. Jones takes great care with choosing when to back away from Prestwood’s storyline to build suspense or delve into research—providing a global view of the then-new American experiment—or to make room for depicting his own memories as richly as the life of his ancestor. One sequence of chapters begins in 1812; William is in command of a volunteer militia, afraid for his life, and he seeks out Mary Norwood now married to someone else (records that day: “Sorrow Sorrow!!!” in an uncommon expression of emotion). In the next chapter, we’re with the narrator in a middle school locker room trying to pick a fight and failing. In the next, President Madison invades Canada and Tecumseh allies with the British against American expansion.  We zoom out then zoom back in to Prestwood’s decision to leave his father in South Carolina and head for the mountains. Jones balances many moving pieces, gently teasing out thematic echoes. The effect: the past and present end up decoding each other.

Some of the most moving moments of the book relate to fatherhood and Jones’ growing admiration for his own parents. With a new, sleepless baby, the narrator is “stuck in a space of wanting both to become [his parents] and to need them.” In thinking about how to raise his sons, Jones also speaks tenderly of the community of men that helped raise him. Jones’ childhood was surrounded by men with a manhood not easy to categorize: “My uncles who came back from basic training with shaved heads and bruises and weapons rarely grew mad…These men could kill or not kill a rabbit on a chilly fall morning and still know something about what it meant to live in a crowded world without demanding too much space, without taking someone else’s. I knew, even then, that I ought to aim to be any one of them one day, perhaps all of them.” His grandparents also quietly shine throughout the book as models for a simple, loving life: “That striving for smallness, a life poured into the land and people around us, a life in the background, was about the holiest thing I knew.” The self is a compilation. Jones’ obsession with one philandering, daydreaming nineteenth-century ancestor ultimately makes him more attuned to the multiplicity of lives that flow into his own.

Jones doesn’t find solid narrative ground, not exactly. There are gaps and questions; he tugged at “those tattered and disconnected threads before finally settling into the knowledge that there was no knowing.” But what he knows for sure is that the threads continue. In one of his letters to Prestwood, Jones sees himself in the long line of generations—one life made up of many and, in turn, a tributary of the lives that follow—and writes: “what we can hope and pray is that when we’re laid in this North Carolina dirt, the lives we’ve passed on will understand, just a touch better, how to make peace out of thin air.” Despite not being able to find all the answers to the past, Jones can be intentional in the story he lives going forward.

Off Izaak Walton Road by Laura Julier

Twice Laura Julier has fallen deeply in love—with a place. The first is a small Iowa City home with a lush yard where she lived for eight years. The second is the focus of her memoir Off Izaak Walton Road: a small patch of land and ramshackle cabin on the Iowa River. The eccentric owner lives part time in Belize, so invites Julier to make the place her second home. For seven years, whenever Julier has a break from teaching at Michigan State University, she makes her pilgrimage. The book traces her love affair from love-at-first-sight, through the deep attachment, to complication and self-examination, to letting go–and in the process invites readers to examine their own psychology and relationship to place and to loss.  

The first time Julier’s car bounces down the gravel road and she sees “a blue one-story dwelling nestled deeply among the gardens and groves” (20) surrounded by low rock walls and walnut, oak, sycamore, juniper, hemlock, and white pine, she is smitten. Not only is she struck by the charm and beauty, but she feels “rooted and grounded,” able to “breathe more deeply, uncurl, unfurl in my own skin, into the place around me, a freedom I have not known before” (25). Even though the landscape is far from her New York City childhood, she writes, “I knew myself to be home” (5). 

Much of the book is a celebration of her beloved, rendered in intimate detail. She catalogs the quirky items in the cabin: a butterfly collection, a 1944 calendar, a 19th century photograph of a woman in a long white dress sitting on a wall. She keeps a nature journal and an ever-lengthening record of birds she can identify. She shares moments of connection with birds, especially owls and eagles. She researches the local animals, recording their habits and life cycles. Like someone piecing together the story of a loved one’s past, she scours old documents to learn the history of her little bend of the Iowa River and traces its ownership and lineage all the way back to prehistoric times. 

Julier also shares vulnerable, almost mystical moments of transformative union. One spring, when she first arrives for a stay and opens the car door, she is unexpectedly washed by overwhelming, unprocessed emotions. But when she steps into the space, she feels “safe under the sky to open my rib cage,” and her “long-held, well-tended self-protecting membrane thins.” She begins crying, “exhales into the wide spaces.”  She continues:

And in that loosening, in that spilling, in the opening, it is as if an equation finishes, balances. Yes, there are old wounds I carry, but instead of curling in upon the pain, tightening and protecting, withdrawing, I follow it, expanding moving swelling into the space here, and it dissipates, rising with the heat. There is no one here, no intrusion, no fear, no long-ingrained impulse to draw, withhold, subdue. It is rising, my breath rises, I spread my arms, raise my gaze.

And there above me, of all the spots in the wide open sky, exactly above me, three red-tailed hawks are riding the swelling, rising thermals. (132)

Julier’s rhythmic language, her choice to leave out the pause of punctuation in “expanding moving swelling” reflects the ecstatic nature of her union. Her love affair, which has melted the barrier between self and other, offers her a place of connection and safety which gives her the gift of emotional release and transformation. 

Julier is by nature mystical, but she is also a trained academic, a skeptic, a questioner, and she begins to wonder if her relationship with place has an unhealthy dimension, a clinging that echoes past codependent relationships. When she must return to Lansing, she is “bereft” (29), with a depth of grief at the separation that other people find peculiar. She surmises that her attachment may be rooted in a traumatic childhood. She keeps the specific details of her past private, but we know that she has experienced neglect, betrayal, and abuse—and found sanctuary in any wild spaces she could find at the edges of her urban and suburban neighborhoods. People were dangerous; nature was trustworthy. 

Midway through the book, she recognizes she may have idealized her beloved. A friend who comes to visit Julier’s paradise comments that “it feels a little like the site of some sort of industrial accident” (162).  Julier sees the landscape through her eyes: “Sand and gravel pits, a field of recycled cars, two concrete plants, a river lined by trees with their tops sheared off. It’s not pretty” (163).  She admits to the reader that Izaak Walton Road is often littered with trash and the Iowa River is indeed polluted. 

There are other complications in her relationship. Julier is a lover–and rescuer–of all small creatures, yet she can’t save all the snails and turtles from being crushed by barreling pickup trucks or the frogs who die from a mysterious ailment. Her cold and crumbly cabin is filled with insects and mice. She can’t prevent her cats from killing those mice, nor live at peace with their deaths. She traces this, too, back to her childhood, recognizing that in her obsession with protecting little animals, “I am caring for the small, the vulnerable, the wounded part of myself” (179). 

Her intense attachment might also echo generational losses. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, then Eastern Poland. When the family transplants into the mishmash of the New York melting pot and has to focus on survival, they have no capacity to grieve what they have lost: “My mother would not talk about the land her parents left to come to the tenements of New York. Would not even entertain the idea of making a trip to find out. Would not acknowledge until I was an adult that she knew the language, remembered its cadences and vocabulary from childhood. How much I wanted her to teach me something other than how to cover loss with shame and silence”(6). Julier’s despair at separation might partially be her family’s unresolved grief at being stripped from their homelands. 

Ultimately, her love affair comes to an abrupt and unexpected end when the owner of the cabin, a solitary and erratic person, prohibits Julier from returning. For a time, Julier returns to secretly observe from a distance. Over time, though, she recognizes that the place has taught her how to let go. Over the years, she has watched species thrive and disappear, seen the land carved by storms and floods, researched the way the Iowa River had changed paths over eons. She realizes “that there is a life cycle for a place, for an ecosystem, and for individuals . . . Everything had changed, and I with it” (262). 

In the end, it was not the physical place alone that had transformed Julier, but her relationship with it: her openness, her attentiveness, her capacity to love. “I’d been holding on as if the place is what had kept me rooted and grounded, as if the place itself had been the source of any joy” (262). She would take what she had learned with her and share it with others—both with her writing and in her new career as a hospital and hospice chaplain. “I needed to return to the lessons of paying attention: it was walking the road day after day, the sensory attention of sight and sound, the face-to-face encounters that taught me” (263). The gift of time immersed in the natural world in which her rhythms were in tune with natural rhythms, of daily walks and chores, of paying attention with all her senses, of connecting with other species—all this had returned her to herself. 

Funeral Playlist by Sarah Gorham

In her memoir-in-essays entitled Funeral Playlist, Sarah Gorham prepares an actual playlist befitting an intentional celebration of life. Gorham’s musical choices are real; her analytic response, contemporary. The result is an enthralling series of essays that evoke compassion, provide consolation, and—through music and writing—create art centered around death. Gorham’s exploration of the playlist she would want at her funeral is not morbid, though, and each essay is not necessarily part of the list as the collection is full of shouts and joy.

Sarah Gorham has previously published two essay collections, Alpine Apprentice, and Study in Perfect, which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books, and with Jeffrey Skinner, the editor of the anthology Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance. She is also the author of four poetry collections.

In the “Author’s Note” of Funeral Playlist, Gorham suggests that her project is to use her “rather gloomy” practice of collecting “melancholy music” to examine “how music and mortality connect.” Nevertheless, her exploration here is not at all gloomy. There is freedom to be found in facing profound loss. For ballast, we need music; in Funeral Playlist the musical notes range from a mourning dove to the opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, from humming to the inimitable Nina Simone. The “sound of mourning,” suggests Gorham, is found in the quotidian, and in the sound of daughters (readers will later discover that one of these daughters is Gorham herself):

Four sisters, each of them, shy of adulthood, sit on the floor outside their mother’s bedroom. There she lies dying, there she has asked for a little solitude…. Outside her door, seated cross-legged on the wall-to-wall carpet, they carry on their chorus of sniffles and sneezes, stutters, and coughs. The air conditioner churns away.

In the initial essay “‘Perchoo,’ or the Music of Mourning,” a final breath, singing birds, and the insistent doorbell are discordant sounds that nonetheless occur almost simultaneously. Gorham’s mother takes a “last rusty breath,” and the doorbell rings. Even in death, dry cleaning is delivered. The mourning dove is the Wisconsin state bird of her mother’s home state, and the bird links winged creatures and final exhales. While the making of art provides hope, the act of reading also provides hope, as it does for the reader of Funeral Playlist. Although these musical works might be played at a funeral, what is more important is how we experience the music—and these essays—now.

In the fourth piece of the book, titled with the name of the work the essay explores, “Amarilli, mia bella,” by Giulio Caccini / Vocalist: Cecilia Bartoli,” Gorham describes how the process of listening is also a process of grieving:

‘Amarilli mia bella’ doesn’t wear thin with continual listening or bloat inside our brains until we sour and must break off the crush. It is one of many “art songs,” frequently extracted from the grandiosity of opera to stand alone in an intimate address and, like most such songs, it’s soaked with adoration or elegy, love and/or death, life in its most basic terms. Amarilli is music to close your eyes to, beginning with story, carried through unearthly melody, arousing a bevy of images in the mind. Listening, we have no choice but to dream.

Gorham makes palpable the personal experience of Cacinni’s song with her own amateur voice lesson: “There’s a stretch below middle F where I sing comfortably in what 13th century composers called pectoris, my chest voice—high tenor, low alto—why I stood between the two sections in college choirs. My hidden voice of little color.” How does one train to sing? Where in the body does a voice like Cecilia Bartoli’s come from? Gorham suggests art is made, but it is also born, practiced, crafted, and performed. Art is the ache to be alive.

Gorham muses in the Bartoli essay, as she attends voice lessons: “what is art but a yearning to be loved, accepted, to leave something of yourself behind for those present and those to be born?” This question connects to her central project: our own, imagined funeral ceremonies might include people we’ve adored, experiences we’ve filmed, and music we’ve admired. But unless we plan our own memorial services, the eulogies will be written by others and the music chosen for our final adieu will be an educated guess. We will have no say in whether the melodies come out of a tinny boom box, via a live chamber orchestra, or by way of a jazz band.

In “Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair” we return to the earlier image of the four daughters—Gorham and her sisters—holding vigil during their mother’s death. This shattering event, in a roundabout way, leads to Gorham’s true beloved. They meet at the artist’s retreat Yadoo and hear Nina Simone on a “small boom box balanced on a chair”: “She was singing our song, but we did not know it was our song.” In Nina’s “state of grace,” the two writers find each other: “He introduced me to the sonnet, acrostic, villanelle, sestina, and other forms. Ironically, it was an opened latch, a discipline that steered me away from years of modestly successful free verse.” While major chords emotionally often imply joy, and minor chords tribulation, Gorham conveys the layers of a life with major chords as brighter sounds and minor cords as sombre ones. Simone’s song traverses the major and minor chords of Gorham and her partner’s long-married life: “To close, Nina resolves to a major key. It may be an attempt to oblige the audience, to lift the mood. All shall be well, we might be thinking, despite the time spent in a minor key. All manner of things shall be well.”

Gorham has a poet’s auditory facility, but she also has an essayist’s ability to follow curious pathways. Funeral Playlist—because of this musical curiosity—allows us to make connections between noise and the unexpected, between music and death. While Funeral Playlist is a collection of fascinating explorations, varied in length and reflection, it is happily not a linear memoir, and a musical crescendo never comes. There is not one missed note in this beautifully written, soulful collection.

Etruscan Press
$18.60 Paperback | Buy Here

The Murmur of Everything Moving by Maureen Stanton

Who among us knows how we will measure up when the person we love is diagnosed with a terrible illness that will alter the course of our life? Will we run away, wash our hands of the affair, saying we didn’t sign up for this? Or will we hold fast? Imagine being twenty-three years old, recently graduated from college, and falling in love with a twenty-seven-year-old who, though he’s the father of three children and in the midst of a divorce, you fully commit yourself to. An easy enough commitment when in the first throes of love. Now imagine yourself two years later when the man you followed is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  How will you respond to this test of your love and character? That is the underlying question that runs through Maureen Stanton’s harrowing memoir The Murmur of Everything Moving, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. 

Maureen, our protagonist, is bartending at the Hitching Post in Wappingers Falls, New York, to save money for a long-planned trip to Europe when Steve, an electrician from Michigan on a temporary job, walks into the bar. In short order, they are a couple. Eight euphoric weeks after their whirlwind meeting, Maureen quits her job and books a flight to Europe. While in Europe, Steve finishes his temporary job and moves back to Michigan to resume the life he’d temporarily left. And so, the shortest and most conventional stage of their story and the memoir ends. When Maureen cuts her trip short, having found herself missing Steve more than she expected, she impulsively buys a one-way ticket to Michigan. By Labor Day she decides to settle with him in Saline, twenty miles southwest of Ann Arbor. Now they begin to make a life together—finalizing Steve’s divorce, establishing Maureen’s relations with Steve’s children and family while she looks for a job. After the carefree eight weeks of early love, they struggle with the trials of the reality of their lives. There are enough ups and downs to make them reconsider their future, but they stay together with the belief they will be able to work out their issues. These two periods of Maureen and Steve’s story occupy 69 pages of a 250-page memoir, but they are not the heart of it. Yet they are essential to establish the love that will be tested in ways neither one of them predicted. Two years after Maureen and Steve meet, Steve learns that the mysterious back pain that had been increasingly troubling him is caused by cancer, widespread and terminal. The memoir pivots from the story of youthful love to a very different kind of story that covers the eighteen months from diagnosis to Steve’s death at the age of thirty-one. 

What follows their initial courtship is an agonizingly detailed immersion into Steve’s treatments, the physical symptoms of his cancer, and the radical effects upon his body. Stanton spares us nothing. She has decided to take us inside what happens to a once-healthy young man when he is colonized by cancer. And not just the physical devastation, but the devastation of his hopes and dreams for his relationship with Maureen. The narrator immerses readers in the couple’s day-to-day traumas, the desperate searches for alternative treatments, the drugs and their after-effects, the institutional indifference of the medical world of appointments and tests, the brutal world of cancer. Whatever their questions were before the diagnosis about their future, Maureen unequivocally commits herself to stay with Steve, to be by his side, to be nurse and caretaker and loving companion to the end, regardless of the toll it exacts upon her life. In choosing to make Steve’s care the most important thing in her life, she sacrifices her own hopes and dreams of a young woman in her twenties. We follow these two narrative lines—Steve’s decline and Maureen’s struggle for self-preservation in the face of such tragedy: they are interwoven and can’t be pulled apart. He extends his life past the initial survival date he was given of two to eighteen months. Regardless, we know the end of this story: he will not survive. We follow their emotional struggles to fight his disease and ultimately to accept his coming death. Their struggles aren’t identical. Steve sinks into inevitable depressions, angers, fears, and emotional changes brought about by chronic intense pain and isolation. He’s a young man who has been stripped of his youthful vitality. Maureen, on the other hand, struggles to be who Steve needs, to withstand his devastating mood changes and physical deteriorations, without losing herself entirely. She cannot save him. What can I do? she asks over and over. The memoir embodies both the question and the answer. Along the way, against great odds, she discovers that they have not lost the love they began with, although it has been changed.

What is notable about Stanton’s approach to writing about Steve’s illness and death is her refusal to spare anyone. No looking away, no skipping over terrible scenes, no vague or neutral descriptions. These characters are not always their best selves. She plunges us into the nitty-gritty of what cancer does to Steve and the unimaginable acts she performs as his caretaker, and she does so in graphic detail. Near the end, when nothing more can be done to slow his disease, Steve requires around-the-clock care. Stanton describes the elaborate process of moving Steve from the couch into the bathroom. “To use the bathroom, he reached his hands to me and I pulled him up from the couch. Then he stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. He bore his weight on my back (at six-one, he weighed a hundred pounds, twenty pounds less than I weighed), and we lumbered slowly into the bathroom.” His every movement is dependent upon Maureen.

Her writing is shocking in its visceral immersion, as if she’s chosen to break the taboos about how we talk and write about death. Steve is not whisked away to suffer in a hospital alone. She is with him right to the end, an end that is ugly, and she does not sanitize it. While Steve’s story is riveting, what I think about, after reading the last page, is how Maureen discovered what she was made of in the most dire of circumstances. She found she was someone who holds fast:

On this, Steve’s last day of life, I felt able to do anything for him, to suffer with him, the meaning of compassion, to love him body and soul, to help him die, whatever that might take. I wanted him to know, before he left this world, what love was.

The memoir does not end with Steve’s death. During his illness she was so busy attending to his care that grief did not touch her. In the aftermath, she realizes that when “Steve’s pain ended, mine would begin.” From that pain, Stanton has made this beautiful memoir.