on Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays by Joey Franklin

“Certainly, I am as inclined as anyone to run away from uncomfortable truths, but for too long, delusional thinking has been killing us softly, one narcissistic fairy tale at a time.”

Joey Franklin reveals this startling observation in the introduction to Delusions of Grandeur, ten reflective essays with expansive endnotes and sources. Franklin, the author of another University of Nebraska collection, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married, is the father of three boys and is about to turn forty. He has challenges teaching his children how to become good men while he struggles with more global concerns such as social injustice, the meaning of life, and the American mythologies we impart to our children. In the book’s first essay, “Toy Soldiers,” Franklin poses an interesting premise.

Imagine, for instance, if my boys opened a new pack of little green army men, and along with the grenade-throwing captain, the brave scout, the determined rifle man, and that obedient private there were also shell-shocked troops curled up in the fetal position, soldiers laid in hospital beds nursing amputations, maybe a soldier back home waiting on the phone with the VA, one in civilian clothes trying to find work and struggling to relate to his family, one contemplating a bottle of pills, or the end of his rifle.

Growing up during the Vietnam War, I feared for my brother, friends, and classmates who faced the threat of being drafted. Some veterans had already returned home to a country that despised them, as if the recruits had caused the conflict themselves. The aftermaths of war are ugly, and Franklin rightly wants these real outcomes to be questioned as part of our culture’s children’s games that glorify war.

Franklin demonstrates his gift of storytelling when he switches writing styles, and adopts from a more lyrical approach in an essay about an embarrassed boy who loved a fat girl in the brief essay “Girl Fight.” Or, despised her, depending on the moment. As painful as first loves often are, Franklin employs the use of a refrain to lighten the mood, “we got to talking about girls, as boys do,” “my secret had gotten out that day, as secrets do,” “I knew that insult would hang in the air, as insults do.” This technique conjures an image of a storytelling circle where the seated listeners chime in during the chorus. Placement of this essay about Franklin’s own childhood is juxtaposed against his concerns for how his boys are being influenced, creating a nostalgic mood for simpler times and lost innocence.

In the essay “Good Enough,” Franklin uses a numbered form to present a collage of ideas unified by their exploration of “good” as it pertains to the English language, human behavior, religious pursuits, biases, and personal development. Using the revelatory notion that a Good Samaritan isn’t good based on action alone, but for having stopped to help in the first place, Franklin supposes that being good is not solely defined by action but includes motivation. On good grammar, Franklin tells us that the rules of language should be considered a baseline for creativity and expansion.

And the artists who’ve created our finest works of literature figured out long ago what our contemporary linguists are only, in this century, finally emphasizing–that good language makes its own rules. Sure, there are foundational principles—essential grammars that make language recognizable and reproducible—but these are merely foundations to build on.

And, on good parenting, Franklin admits to looking like a good example versus actually being one.

I’m pushing forty now, which means I should have all kinds of insight and maturity about oversimplified notions of goodness, but, as it is, the universe has blessed me with children, which is another way of saying the universe isn’t done proving I’m a hypocrite.

Franklin later admits impatience for his boys to develop their own “ethical backbones.” After wishing them to grow up in a hurry, he realizes that time will allow the process to happen with or without, and despite his meddling.

By the fourth essay in the book, I realized, this was not simply a meditation on uncomfortable truths and mythic delusions. It was also, at times, an insightful demonstration of the craft of writing personal essays, experimenting with form, tone, and structure, and providing guideposts for other writers when crafting their work artistically. Many essays open with a compelling scene followed by background information before the heart of the story appears. The essays often revisit the initial scene after Franklin creates or fashions a larger context and conveys a meaningful, sometimes unexpected message.

At the conclusion of each essay, I felt satisfied, even enlightened, as when a teacher shares a piece of hard-earned wisdom. For instance, I’ll never think about homelessness in the same way after reading Franklin’s essay, “Not in My Backyard.” In it, a homeless couple is brought to life with faces and names as he realizes how difficult it is for them to learn basic urban survival skills, that is, if they had a home, to clean it, take the trash out, make dinner. About a man who lives just outside his backyard, Franklin asks, “Were we anything more than just another house of ‘haves’ laughing on the other side of the fence?”

Midway through the book, the significance of race on America’s often delusion-minded culture becomes clear in “White Trash.” Franklin explores the American Dream of upward class mobility available only to those with the access and connections to make the climb.

The dilemma reveals a troubling contradiction—the American Dream promises that you and I can, through hard work and determination, improve our social standing; but then it simultaneously reassures us that our social standing doesn’t matter in the first place. The truth, of course, is that all of us are, to a greater or lesser extent at the mercy of where we came from, who are parents were, and what society thinks those facts say about our potential. . . . The American economy has always left someone behind, and the rest of us benefit from the notion that the poor have only themselves to blame.

Franklin transports us from his poor upbringing when his mother illegally dumped their weekly trash in an office dumpster to her current well-appointed home near Salt Lake City with an Impressionist style cityscape hanging above the fireplace. At first glance, the painting is a tribute to the immigrant’s dream of success in America. Upon closer inspection, a homeless camp is tucked into the shrubbery, the truth in plain sight. But you have to look closely to see it. While some prosper, others nearby face a daily struggle to survive.

Franklin tackles other moving topics with candid personal narrative in Delusions of Grandeur. These include God, nakedness (“The Full Montaigne”), white privilege, revelatory experiences he had as a Mormon missionary, and social injustice. Franklin’s prose is accessible and evocative. One fine example is the essay, composed in fragments, about Trayvon Martin, “Worry Lines.”

In it, Franklin observes the acute differences of raising a Black son in America versus raising a white son. It starts with Nolan, Franklin’s middle child, questioning the worry lines on his father’s face. The story segues to someone else’s son, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin killed while walking home from a convenience store in the rain, wearing a hoodie. The white man who shot him worried Martin was a threat. Martin’s parents had worried about their son, too. Advice they gave about racial confrontations was to “eliminate yourself from the equation.” Possible ways include backing down, humbling, appeasing, fleeing. By alternating Trayvon’s story and Franklin’s story of raising three boys, the author effectively captures the disparity in the two circumstances and the different scales of worry.

The book represents the struggle of humankind across many miles and varied cultures, from a college student donating blood plasma in Ohio to the “joyful” aftermath of a tsunami in Japan, which gave one impacted family unexpected optimism. Franklin’s keen powers of observation uncover parallels in his life, perhaps in all of our lives, opening deep layers of meaning and connection. Still, at the core is the heartfelt conflicts of a man approaching middle-age, trying to be a good father in twenty-first century America.

Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays by Joey Franklin

on A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

At the heart of Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s impressive debut is the moment when, after being found by her mother in a state of distress, she winds up, at eighteen, in a locked hospital ward and is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As the reality of the doctor’s pronouncement sinks in, Sawchyn begins to consider what it means for her future:

Unhinging from my body—manifested in a mood that swung down then back up, hanging, mid-air, like Wile E. Coyote just before he realizes he’s gone off a cliff—was part of my body, my biology, and something to endure or manage with a lifetime of medication and behavior modification and therapy.

In the case of mental illness, a diagnosis is often a life sentence, and throughout this collection of twelve linked essays, Sawchyn considers the profound effects of being deemed “ill” in a highly normative culture. Her story is complicated by the fact that, seven years after that first hospital visit, she weans herself off her psych meds and confirms what she suspected all along—that she was misdiagnosed, a remarkably common mistake in the highly subjective field of mental health care. “When withdrawal ended,” she tells us, “I remained myself, both feet mostly on solid earth, having gained silent passage back into the kingdom of the well.”

A Fish Growing Lungs brings to mind Susanna Kaysen’s classic memoir, Girl, Interrupted, where the author writes of her own misdiagnosis, and the nearly two years she spent in a mental institution. Both books highlight how certain behaviors—underage drinking, drugs, multiple sex partners—are much more likely to be deemed “abnormal” when the offender is a young woman. “The easiest explanation for a girl like me, wild wild wild, was illness,” Sawchyn tells us, pointing out how our culture punishes girls for unbecoming behavior, and “dictates . . . that mad women be locked away.” Part of the danger of such a diagnosis is that it immediately makes the patient an unreliable narrator, unable to advocate for herself. “Once considered of unsound mind,” Sawchyn says, “all protestations to the contrary are further evidence of delusion.”

Though her former doctors may have questioned her trustworthiness, Sawchyn’s readers should have no such concerns. She is a highly likeable, piercingly honest narrator of her own story, unafraid to shine light on her worst moments, or to celebrate her best. One of the collection’s most memorable essays, “Notes from the Cliff Face,” weaves together Sawchyn’s experience hiking up a mountain in Shenandoah National Park (for which she is ill-prepared), with her story of addiction and recovery. The cliffs here are both beautiful and dangerous, featuring “the kind of sucker-punch scenery on which this country was founded,” and serve as an apt backdrop for Sawchyn’s mediations on the years she spent “toeing the line between interesting and ruinous.”

In lesser hands, this mountain-as-metaphor strategy might seem forced, but here the forward momentum of the climb provides a stark contrast with the stagnancy of the addict. When the essay digresses into vivid descriptions of how cocaine looked, smelled, and tasted in different parts of the country, we see that where another person might note the variations in culture or geography, for Sawchyn’s younger self, everything beyond the drug itself has become nearly irrelevant. She writes convincingly about the bitter resilience of the addict, about hitting rock bottom then finding the obscene drive to go even lower. “Sometimes, what looks like a bottom drops out,” she says, “and a person finds herself crawling along cool white tiles with bloodstains in the grout toward more.” She finally reaches the mountain’s summit, but knows that in recovery there is no such apex, only “a slow and uninteresting process that’s consisted of abstinence, critical self-reflection, begrudging acceptance, and restraint.” It is a testament to her writing that she manages to make the tedious process of recovery as interesting as the coke binges and other assorted dramas of her youth.

A Fish Growing Lungs contains harrowing and thoughtful essays about love and sex, writing and healing, nonsuicidal self-injury, and Sawchyn’s sometimes difficult relationship with her family. One thing that ties the collection together, in regard to her family, is the idea of displacement. The daughter of a Chinese-Malaysian mother and Ukrainian father, Sawchyn tells us that since her parents are the only interracial couple on either side of the family, her relatives never quite embrace her as they might another niece or cousin or granddaughter. “I have always felt out of place where I believed I should belong,” she says, a feeling she can never quite shake.

Sawchyn’s relationship with her parents is further complicated by the fact that “family history” is a strong indicator for both mental illness and substance abuse, and she finds herself combing through photographs, “trying to trace [her] wounds back to a single point of origin.” At one point, she asks a therapist, half-jokingly, if she can blame all her troubles on her parents. The therapist points out that even if she could, it wouldn’t be helpful: “You still have to fix it.”

The narrator’s parents and relatives are just a few of the cast of characters who populate the collection, and Sawchyn has a wonderful knack for describing the people around her. Of her Ukrainian grandmother, she writes, “She reminded me of a Midwestern spring—surprisingly gentle and then cold and storming.” Elsewhere, she describes a friend as “the only one of us who can actually execute a dance move.” The narrator watches as the woman “dips . . . bends, smiles contentedly at her own movements like a cat curled in a patch of warm laundry.” These characters—boyfriends, relatives, therapists, recovering addicts, loyal friends—are not simply here as background scenery. Sawchyn understands that our personalities cannot be disentangled from our cultural and social networks and can never be examined strictly on their own. And she believes that “it is through our relationships with others that we best come to know ourselves.”

Some of the essays here experiment with invented or unusual forms—“Wellness Index” is an abecedarian that carries us from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to ziprasidone while “Withdrawal” takes the form of a psychiatrist’s notes (with occasional and often sarcastic asides from the author). These offer a more distanced (and possibly more objective) view of the narrator, but I prefer when Sawchyn speaks more directly. Her voice is intimate, candid, witty, brainy, and utterly compelling, and I think most readers will want to hear as much of it as she can offer.

The book begins with an epigraph from Joan Didion, who says that “we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we once were, whether we find them attractive company or not.” At times Sawchyn resists this notion, expressing reservations about examining our former selves too deeply. After returning to college after a stint in rehab, she encounters a classmate who says addiction stories are “expected” and “overdone,” and finds herself nodding in enthusiastic agreement. “What I lacked in self-confidence, I made up for with the earnest desire to pretend like the person I was never existed.”

But in the end, Sawchyn acknowledges the power of remembering (and recording) the past. She argues that self-examination is important, but so are moments of letting go. Where she once turned to drugs for this kind of mental oblivion, she now flails around the dancefloor, or holds a demanding yoga pose on the sidewalk alongside a busy street.

Her pursuit of these two complimentary states have served Sawchyn well as a writer, and her vivid descriptions, perfectly rendered characters, deep intelligence, and hard-won wisdom make it clear that this collection is our introduction to an important new voice in contemporary nonfiction. Addicts, she says, “must tell ourselves our addiction will not swallow us. We must tell many smaller lies in service of this larger one.” It is a great boon to readers that in A Fish Growing Lungs, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn has chosen instead to tell the truth.

A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

on The Way of Imagination by Scott Russell Sanders

I began reading the essays of Scott Russell Sanders when I encountered “The Inheritance of Tools” in The Best American Essays 1987. I’ve collected his books of essays ever since and, as a life-long resident of Great Lakes states, have felt a strong sense of identification with works like Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Writing From the Center, and Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys. Anytime we drive south from Michigan to Indiana, I think of it as Sanders territory. It isn’t lost on me that his later books—The Force of Spirit, A Private History of Awe—are expanding in their breadth of meditative exploration while maintaining their solid narrative focus. The Way of Imagination, his most recent collection, is his most profound and necessary book yet.

“We are in trouble,” Sanders tells us in the first sentence of “Living at Midnight,” the introductory essay. “By we, I mean all of us—every tribe, every nation, rich and poor, old and young, human and non-human. Every species on Earth is at risk, but only one keeps increasing the danger, day by day.” Concerned about the ways “all the systems that support life on this blue planet” are being degraded by humans, he cites spreading deserts, melting glaciers, rising seas, collapsing fisheries, and increasingly destructive storms, floods, and wildfires. What keeps him from despair is his awareness of the creative power of imagination, to which he attributes “all the enhancements of human knowledge and well-being.”

These first pages, so rich and urgent, indicate the range of Sanders’ subject matter, the precision of his references, the power of his prose. Each essay that follows is replete with vital allusions and concrete examples; each expands an argument that is profound; each probes the problems we face (or are failing to face) and searches for the means by which we might confront and resolve them.

Sanders considers these essays as “chapters in a single inquiry,” addressing core questions about “our reckless behavior,” “our violence toward Earth linked to our violence toward one another,” and the ways we might “begin undoing the damage we have caused.” He asks, “What would a peaceful, sustainable, and just way of life look like, and how might we achieve it?” And he offers answers he hopes might serve as “small steps toward a healing vision.” He credits imagination, rather than adherence to an existing social order, with making “advances in ethical and ecological understanding, such as shifting attitudes toward birth control, gay marriage, sexual orientation, the role of predators, the role of animals, and the place of humans in the web of life.” The book abounds in such sweeping lists—Sanders’s perspective is never narrow or limited.

The essays in The Way of Imagination present the personal and the philosophical in potent combinations. Elements of memoir run through most essays—reflections on Sanders’ upbringing, his youth, his intimate surroundings. His reflections on the nature of beauty, in “Useless Beauty,” originate from the shell of a chambered nautilus, purchased at a flea market thirty years earlier by his mother. “Immersed in Mystery” begins with the memory of how his high school science project on evolution provoked someone to condemn him to hell and leads him to assert that, “our capacities for reason and imagination,” whether acquired “by natural selection or divine gift,” are “our most distinctive features.” He invites us to “welcome every insight into the vast, ancient, elegant cosmos and our own fleeting existence.”

In “Conscience and Resistance” Sanders considers the influence that the Trappist monk Thomas Merton had on his thinking, beginning, as a junior in college, with his exposure to the essay “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” His subsequent reading of Merton’s writing led him to conclude that “nature is simply this grand, evolving flow, which brings each of us into existence, bears us along, and eventually reclaims us.” Building on Merton’s vision, he asks, “How can we desecrate Earth? How can we keep from crying out in wonder and praise?”

In “A Writer’s Calling” Sanders discusses his relationship to the essay, claiming that he is unwilling to settle for information or entertainment alone in the literature he reads. He tells us, “I wish to have the doors of perception cleansed; I wish to imagine my life afresh.” His writing process is dynamic and interactive, relying on his “willingness to be changed” by what he writes, “to dive into confusion in search of greater clarity.”

Elsewhere, he has said that he writes in hope of gaining “greater insight” into an issue that puzzles him; if he feels a sense of discovery while composing, he knows “the essay is alive.” His examples of questions that have led to his essays include ones about his father’s drinking and its effect of him, the models of manhood that influenced him while he was growing up, and the place of humans in nature.

“The Infinite Extent of Our Relations,” his chapter centered on Walden, offers an intimate examination of one reader’s interaction with what is, for him, an essential and formative reading of the book. He first read the book at seventeen and wrestled with its stylistic and philosophical challenges while being inspired by its wisdom and honesty. The essay ultimately considers not only what Sanders has gained from multiple re-readings but also assesses how Walden has prepared him to understand his own times and his own life. As one who, like Sanders, has often felt the need to re-read Walden—and gotten more from it each time I have—I can’t help feeling that Sanders himself has written a book comparable to Walden in its wisdom and insight. Given where we and our planet are at the current moment, it is perhaps an even more compelling and urgent work than Thoreau’s.

Throughout the collection, the essays are bolstered by allusions to a wide range of literature, reinforcing his belief that “Every tool, invention, work of art, scientific experiment, medical discovery, and social reform begins in the mind as a question, a picture, a hunch” and that “Time and again, bold acts of imagination have given rise to profound shifts in our ethical views and social practices.”

In “Writing While the World Burns,” he cites twenty of his contemporary authors that he feels an imaginary young woman living in 2100 should read for a picture of what the world was like a century earlier—that is, the time we’re living in—writers such as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Robert Michael Pyle. These are writers who “recognize that we are born from this living web, we are sustained by it while we live, we return to it when we die, and we share our astonishing transit with millions of other species.” He quotes four prime examples of this outlook by Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stegner, and Barbara Kingsolver. The literary and academic contexts of these essays are rich and varied and suggestive of a broader literary perspective in which Sanders flourishes.

The final essays are considerably more personal, yet never stray from the social and ecological issues that he examines throughout the collection. “A Writer’s Calling” is revealing not only of craft but also of global issues; “True Wealth” anchors itself in his wife’s development of Parkinson’s before considering the industrial forces at work on everyone’s biology. In the last essay, “God in the Garden,” he balances his family’s struggles with their health—his wife’s illness, his son’s cancer, his own aging—with the challenges everyone faces from such formidable forces as climate change, politics, and God.

Drawing on his religious background, he examines the story of Adam and Eve in “Genesis” in contrast to his dealings with the times in which he lives: the first couple were driven from the Garden of Eden into a recognizably natural environment for their starkly human transgression, the Sanderses from their familiar home of four decades into one more serviceable by their physical needs. By recognizing both the rewards the first couple’s expulsion gave to mankind—we exist because they couldn’t stay in Eden—and the challenges to life on the planet their descendants presently face, he remains attuned to the most troubling issues of our time and, as a result, readers may align with our humble existence and its global dangers.

Referring to his opening essay, Sanders remains, if not optimistic, at least hopeful. “The earth is alive yet, despite human folly,” he tells us. “Although the atmosphere is trapping ever more heat, the sun still shines.” He takes comfort in these things. “The soil, however abused, is still fertile. And so is the human imagination, this visionary power that gets us into trouble,” he concludes, “and may, with our gathered effort, get us out again.”

The Way of Imagination by Scott Russell Sanders

on Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson and The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Two wonderfully readable recent books probe the authors’ past losses in order to reimagine their and our futures. Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson and The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky look towards Norway, France, and the influence Northern Europe has long had on American thought. Both are replete with fascinating microhistories, engaging in what Kadetsky terms, early on, her mother’s “quest for the past.”

The Memory Eaters won the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and adds to a growing list of books that meld several nonfiction genres—essay, biography, chronicle, and memoir. Kadetsky brings us deep into her family’s collective memory, about early ancestors as well as an aunt who dies young and whose mother is an alcoholic. The book returns to a present time in which Kadetsky wrestles with the ethical and financial burden of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s and a sister suffering from substance abuse. She memorializes her mother’s modeling career as Boston’s top fashion model in the 1960s, who is depicted sometimes harshly, but also with tenderness. She doesn’t recall her daughter’s name but quips, “Don’t worry, I don’t know my name either.”

On the other hand, Peterson’s essay collection employs first-person narratives as its backbone but focuses chiefly on Norway and Switzerland and such topics as nature, collecting, ecology, and loss. This author remarks little on her own family and is laconic about her personal story. Dispatches is made up of lyric essays. In Peterson’s skilled hands, the lyric essays confront difficult truths about the world and retain the fullness of their complexity because they are not over-explicated.

Dispatches from the End of Ice is very much a book about the outdoors, glacial hikes, Nordic boat rides, and Wyoming storms. Her adventures on glaciers often become what movie reviewers call “nail-biting.” In addition, she drives perilously along a Wyoming-Colorado highway in a blizzard, hikes up a glacier and falls into a deep crevasse, and shows up at Norway’s Bremuseum only a day after it has burned to the ground.  

The Memory Eaters, on the other hand, brings us inside New York City’s apartment buildings and hospitals, yoga studios and well-pruned urban parks. Kadetsky reads, drives, meditates, climbs staircases, and walks in an attempt to better grasp human existence through the microcosm of her own family. She struggles to keep her sister and mother financially afloat as twenty-first century America provides insufficient Medicaid and Medicare, even for people privileged by education and whiteness. This sociopolitical element subtly and masterfully blends with the philosophical threads in The Memory Eaters and makes it an illuminating joy to read.

One key preoccupation links the two books, making them necessary and timely: How can we ever be certain on a philosophic level that what we know about our world and ourselves is true?

The authors bring their readers through Nordic and New York landscapes to help us think about what we know—its nature, its preservation, its power, and its limits. Asking what makes memory and knowledge possible, Peterson and Kadetsky demonstrate how we might reconcile ourselves to the utter impossibility of knowing anything for sure. This has always been a principal impulse of the essayist. In the twenty-first century, essayists like Peterson and Kadetsky help us reckon with the way not-knowing persists in spite of how we are also, at the same time, drowning in facts.

Significantly, these two books about the viability of knowledge are also filled with disappearing. In Dispatches, disappearance becomes almost habitual: people disappear one after the other just as buildings and glaciers do. Kadetsky opens with an epigraph from The Odyssey that has Lotos-eating men allowing memories to fade. Then, the first chapter begins: “Perhaps because so many things disappeared in our family . . . my mother undertook many quests for the past.” Soon, the author’s mother disappears from her home. In the penultimate chapter, a therapist offers to help erase her most traumatic memories. Their haunting could, she proposes, be gone for good. “I didn’t want to make it gone,” Kadetsky contends. Despite all the past’s pain and trauma, devastation and drama, “it was still my story, one I wasn’t ready to give up. I couldn’t willingly lose more seconds than I’d lost already.”

For Kadetsky, her quests extend beyond memoir’s typical search for a lost self as she pursues “genealogical doppelgangers” and “imagined pasts,” engaging with what it means to discover—through writing—our own history. Kadetsky ties her mother’s interest in the Uranian society, astrology, and magic and mixes them with surgical innovation and alchemy attributed to an early ancestor, Ambroise Paré. She shows that science involves doubt, scrutiny, and a renegotiation with conventional thought. She writes of a land “thick with fairies and angels and prophecies” and of the science that we might think of as antithetical to those things.

Different scientific disciplines matter to The Memory Eaters at different times. Social sciences examine culture, psychological sciences explain trauma and love, and biological sciences explain a mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Positioned between psychology and biology is addiction’s tyranny: Kadetsky’s sister checks into Bellevue hospital for help with her addiction while the author struggles with how biochemistry and desire conspire to make human beings hurt themselves and those they love.

Similarly, Peterson’s most exquisite essay, “The Speed of Falling,” links Galileo’s experiments with what European and U.S. news sources call “a tragic accident.” During a hike, a young mathematician runs off trail to view the landscape from further up—and disappears. Peterson describes the science of rescue, with numerical precision: this many square feet search, this many feet most likely fallen, this many seconds to hit the ground, this many minutes to bleed out and die.

To produce his text On Motion, Galileo observed hailstorms and dropped equally sized iron and wooden balls off the side of the leaning tower of Pisa. He found that heavier (denser) objects fall faster than lighter (less dense) ones. In this way, the materiality of the body—and its mathematics—stands in for the unspeakable emotion of loss. By juxtaposing the calculations of rescue with the calculations of falling, Peterson discovers the bizarre shared space between logic and grief. Logic can compute the damage, but it cannot approach the human cost of a life or our wonder at its meaning.

Instead of demanding blind faith in science, The Memory Eaters and Dispatches from the End of Ice counterpoint mysticism and observation. In excavating the lineage of scientific proofs, these books demystify the scientific process and illustrate why scientific knowledge, like the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, for example, should be trusted.

Peterson and Kadetsky further interrogate knowledge production via the taxonomies we impose upon it. They each demonstrate how taxonomies allow us not only to organize knowledge, but also to exercise power. Kadetsky’s first chapter is “A Taxonomy of the Unknown” in which she lists years of her acquisitions. Credit cards, envelopes, handwritten tables tracking electrical use, photos, letters, travel visas, and childhood report cards have all been stored by a mother who is rapidly losing her memory.

Later in a chapter called “Memory Pavilion,” she quotes Didion on grief: “Information was comfort.” Like her essayistic foremother, Kadetsky too finds that “order gives us respite from worry.” She expresses suspicions about genealogy even as she conducts it, worrying that all she produces is myth.

Norse myths dominate the early part of Dispatches from the End of Ice. Next, we learn that as the age of European exploration began, seventeenth-century mapmakers tried to match observation to lore. We learn of an early twentieth-century “Theory of World Ice” that gained considerable traction as a rival to Einstein’s theory of relativity. In her powerful essay on museums, “About the Collection,” Peterson, citing thinkers from Plato to contemporary museologists, she complicates the pleasures provided by museums by linking climate change to the days of exploration—which were also days of collecting—and she traces contemporary disasters back to humanity’s lust for the kinds of knowledge they could control.

Together, these two exceptional works of nonfiction help us deepen our grasp on one of the hardest human truths to learn: we must absorb as much knowledge as we can, but no matter how hard we seek, we know very little for sure. Peterson ends by probing the “cautionary” tale of Atlantis and its moral—that a place which grows too powerful and self-confident may well founder. It is wiser to concede powerlessness, vulnerability, and not-knowing. Kadetsky could be talking about the human family when she says “like so much about our family, the answer is ineffable, weightless.” Later, she asks, “Is there a cure for existential grief?”

Kadetsky’s graceful, understated language drives home the special magnitude of grief. A loved one slips away even as she persists, before us, in apparent physical health. A planet retains its splendor even though, at the hands of human industry, it incurs irrevocable harm. Toward the end of the book, Kadetsky realizes, “a desire for not only the place of one’s past, but for its memories in real time, for their return.” She essentializes the rub: “Nostalgia is a paradox of irrecoverability.”

Just as Peterson has brought together myriad other thinkers, Kadetsky cites the great analyst of nostalgia Svetlana Boym, the legendary journalist Janet Malcolm, and André Aciman, the renowned essayist of exile. Peterson includes Emerson, Shelley, and Wittgenstein, as well as works with less famous authors whose titles are fascinating: The Morning of Magicians; Why People Get Lost; Lost Person Behavior; Disney’s World: A Biography; and The Lemming Condition.

These books invite participatory reading, bringing us into a conversation with the past, just as cairns invite hikers and mourners to reckon with loss together and to participate in a collective conversation with the land lying beneath. Indeed, Peterson’s essay “Cairns” turns rock piles into a metaphor for the process of making ideas and of making art. Both authors prove that which creative nonfiction so deliciously permits: gathering a chorus of different writers’ voices, in concert with the minds of readers, to produce something close to the truth.

Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson

on The Blessing by Gregory Orr

Do I dare say my brother’s death was a blessing? 

This first line in Gregory Orr’s memoir serves like a Dutch tilt in cinema. His canted lens disorients us, perhaps to throw us off our expectation that a “blessing” might be anything other than benign.

In 1959, twelve-year-old Orr rises early with his three brothers, heads to the field with their father. They shoot their rifles and kill a deer. Just as they celebrate, Orr’s gun goes off again, this time killing his eight-year-old brother, Peter.

Sprayed with his brother’s blood, Orr runs home, hides in his bed. His mother goes to him, and there she reveals a dark secret: Orr’s father, around age ten, shot and killed his best friend.

Why tell such a horrible secret in the midst of such a crisis? Surely, the mother must have thought it would help Orr see that he wasn’t alone. Accidents happen, even to good people, like his father. As Orr writes, this strange coincidence shakes him even more:

She was speaking to me about this strange and awful coincidence, but her voice was numb and distant. It’s as if she were repeating it to herself simply to hear it spoken aloud, to see if it sounded believable. It didn’t. Not to me. Thus, it sounded unbelievable and terrible, but this was exactly the world I’d entered with my stupid mistake: the world of terrible and unbelievable.

After Peter’s funeral, the parents don’t speak of the accident or Peter again. It’s as if the boy never existed, the accident did not happen. The deafening silence fills Orr with anguish. He assumes his parents hate him as he has become the Biblical Cain . . . the evil, irredeemable brother . . . the boy who angers God so much that he’s cast into the wilderness alone.

Published in 2002 by Council Oak Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Blessing came out in between two blockbuster memoirs: Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) and Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle (2005). While The Blessing received favorable reviews and honors—for the author, a Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and for the book, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and placement on Publishers Weekly’s 2002 list of top fifty best nonfiction books—it never became a New York Times Bestseller.

If one compares Orr’s memoir to Karr’s and Walls’s, in terms of quirky characters and shocking events, The Blessing stands beside them, an equal. Still, the first line signals, this is not your everyday memoir. Orr’s aim is not to create a breathless, fast-paced, page-turner. He’s crafting a quiet, slow examination of a shattered childhood. He picks up the fragments of his young life, sets them under the microscope, and studies all the cracks.

The Orrs lived in rural upstate New York and, no doubt, appeared to be one those Fifties model families as seen on so many television shows, such as Father Knows Best. A dashing, well-liked country doctor, the father races in his sports car over the countryside attending to patients. The mother is a beautiful, MIT-educated homemaker. The boys thrive in the country fresh air of the beautiful Hudson River Valley.

However, the father is an amphetamine addict. He’s reckless with guns and pills. One of Orr’s older brothers, at age three, crawled out of his crib, found the father’s pills, took a handful, and died. Thus, Peter is the second son to have died by accident, perhaps a preventable accident by a more watchful and precautious father.

Even after the boys’ deaths, the father leaves guns and pills strewn around the house. He engages in an affair with a teenage girl. He takes Orr on an ill-conceived rock-climbing adventure for which he has no training or experience, and, of course, the father can’t be bothered to slow down and teach him the basics. Thus, Orr stumbles and ends up dangling over the bluff. By a miracle, the father figures out a way to bring the boy down. He spends the entire drive home trying to convince the boy that he was never in any real danger.

“My father was like a rug merchant,” Orr writes, “who with a single dramatic gesture unsnaps a bright carpet that settles over the plain bare fact of the wood floor.”

Without much forethought, the father hastily moves the family to Haiti. There, Orr’s mother goes in for a routine medical procedure, but picks up an infection and dies. “Now Dad was in charge, the only adult guiding and guarding us,” Orr writes. “Grieving would take its cues from him. Which is to say, there would be no grieving, but instead fortitude and action and a sudden departure like flight from the scene of a crime.”

Father and three sons move back to upstate New York, where he marries the teenage girl, whom he’d had an affair with earlier. She turns out to be suicidal and dangerous, burning all the family’s pictures. “Her violent instability seemed a thing of its own, a vengeful entity unrelated to Cain,” Orr writes. “I felt my identification with Cain beginning to lose its explanatory power.”

Throughout The Blessing, Orr guides readers with a steady, searching, contemplative voice. He combs the past for meaning—not just how it pertains to the deaths of his brothers and mother, but small moments in life, such as a flicker of grief on his father’s face. Orr wonders why his father, having had a similar, terrifying shooting accident as a child refuses to talk about his experience or, at minimum, to reach out to Gregory with just a little comfort. When he confronts his father about his gun accident, he refuses to discuss it—and never will.

So where is the blessing that Orr alludes to in the beginning?

Violent trauma shreds the web of meaning. It destroys all the threads of a relationship that link the hurt self to the world—to other people and objects, to nature, even to the inner world of one’s own feelings. The real task of a trauma victim—the task that makes life worth living again—is to reconnect to the world. To do that, you need to reweave the web, to risk the spinning of new threads until they form a sustaining pattern the self can inhabit.

To reweave Orr’s web, he decides to give back to society. Thus, in 1964, at age seventeen, he canvasses for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The next year, he drives his Ford down to Jackson, Mississippi, and joins the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) protests. There he’s arrested, kicked, beaten with clubs, kidnapped, and taken to a barn where he’s nearly killed.

It’s hardly the redemption Orr sought. In fact, he’s traumatized, barely able to speak, barely able to make sense of anything. Yet he discovers poetry, an art he describes as “born of crisis.” He’s fascinated by the meaning of words, such as bless. In English, it means “to confer spiritual power on someone or something by words or gesture,” such as a pastor or priest sprinkling holy water on a child’s head. Yet, blesser, a French verb, means to wound, and the Old English blestian means “to sprinkle with blood.”

“I feel as if life itself were trying to reveal some mystery to me by making those three sources meet in my own life,” he tells us.

The final shift in Orr’s world comes when he meets his high school English teacher, who leads him into a field of outdoor art objects. There, he sees for the first time the grandly abstract metal sculptures of David Smith. In them, Orr discovers his “martyr’s cross . . . alchemized and shining, metamorphosed . . . into a hundred expressive shapes. . . . Here was my blessing.”

The Blessing is powerful and fulfilling. As a memoir aficionado, I am stunned that none of my friends or colleagues ever mentioned this book to me. Yet Milkweed Editions reissued it in 2019 with a new cover and an afterword by the author. For those of us discovering it for the first time, this is truly a blessing.

The Blessing by Gregory Orr