I Am a Stranger Here Myself  by Debra Gwartney

Visit Whitman Mission National Historic Site outside of Walla Walla, Washington, on a fall day, and you see golden rolling hills against rich blue sky. Bright clouds float toward flat-topped ridges lined with windmills. The scenery stretches spacious and bucolic and belies the bloody past. Here, on November 29, 1847, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, a doctor and his missionary wife, and eleven others were famously massacred. Five Cayuse Indian men were accused of the crime and hanged. News of the violence caused legislators in Washington D.C. to give the territory an official name, Oregon, and to assign a provisional governor who immediately declared war on the Cayuse Nation. In I Am a Stranger Here Myself, winner of the 2017 River Teeth book prize, Debra Gwartney revisits this history.

I’ve known about the Whitman massacre since I was in third grade outside of Los Angeles in the 1970s. I remember distinctly the textbook map that marked the site with a spare black cross. The fact that missionaries had been killed cast terror in my heart. We’d built covered wagons out of shoe boxes that year and written diaries of pioneer families on the Oregon Trail. Plus I’d read all the Little House on the Prairie books. We were taught even then to feel some sympathy—“pity” might be more precise—for the “Indians.” But we never learned the names of the actual tribes, the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Chinook, Walla Walla and others, who were, as Gwartney writes, “beaten down, quashed, forced onto reservations.” We aligned ourselves proudly with the wagon train people and, by extension, the murdered missionaries.

The fact that we valued the lives of white people more than the dramatic losses of indigenous people is not easy for me to admit.

Gwartney’s book boldly embraces this discomfort. Her identification with the white missionaries is redoubled because she grew up in Idaho, much closer to the pioneer era and ethic than I did in suburban LA. The book is an effort to place herself as a woman in this landscape and culture by focusing on Narcissa Prentiss Whitman. The prose is rich, the voice homespun, warm, earnest, and sometimes prickly. The structure—four parts, each of which stands, in some ways, on its own—is complex, intentional, and, at times, challenging.

The book begins on the open road with a large diesel truck trailing Gwartney’s small hatchback—with its Oregon plates and liberal bumper stickers—too closely down a rural Idaho highway in a way that feels menacing to her, as though she’s been targeted as an outsider. The truck sports a rifle rack with “a weapon clicked in tight” and though no violence ensues, the incident leaves Gwartney frustrated, wishing to confront the driver with her bona fides as a fifth-generation Idahoan. Despite the fact that she chose to leave in early adulthood, she writes, she has “Idaho stories that, knit together, would stretch as long as the highway to Boise.”

Gwartney  proceeds to tell stories of her grandmothers, one of whom, Lois, a high school English teacher for 40 years, gave Gwartney her love of books. One of those books happened to be about Narcissa Whitman: “the first Caucasian woman (so say the history books) to cross the Rocky Mountains, the first to give birth to a white baby (same history books.).” Gwartney’s distrust of the stories she’s inherited is already clear from her parentheticals.

From here, we begin tracking Narcissa Whitman’s story. She arrives in the Northwest in 1836 at age 28, and she and her husband along with fellow Presbyterian missionaries Eliza and Henry Spalding are, at first, welcomed by the Cayuse. Gwartney recounts the travails of the wagon trail journey, sans Little House sentimentality, and the triumphs of the early years at the mission. The newcomers plow the earth, build a mill, convert some Indians, and welcome the white settlers who arrive close on their heels.

Meanwhile, Marcus, the doctor, stays busy trying to treat a measles outbreak. He has some success with white patients, but the Indians who carry no genetic immunity are dying. Tensions rise predictably, and within a short dozen years, the Whitmans, too, are dead. Crucially, Gwartney refuses to let anticipation of a bloody climax be the reason we keep reading. The dramatization of the actual massacre—during which Narcissa is shot on the porch, her screams overheard by surviving children who were staying at the mission and would live to tell the tale—comes before we’re even a third of the way into the book.

Instead, she weaves her narrative from a patchwork of scenes, intertwining her own experience with Narcissa’s in ways that become less predictable as the book proceeds. At times it’s a wild stretch. Gwartney’s life, while not entirely smooth-sailing, lacks the drama of the Narcissa’s. She knows as much, of course, and wisely does not try to parallel the journeys, but instead points, through structure, at a deeper theme: a shared sense of dislocation. We follow Narcissa’s monumental trip across the continent, for example, while we trace Gwartney through college and a too-early marriage. Midway through the book, in Part Three, “River of No Return,” the plotlines converge toward what is arguably the climactic juxtaposition: the tragic drowning of Narcissa’s only child, her two-year old daughter, Alice, with an ill-fated river raft trip Gwartney takes with her family.

The narratives of the two accidents alternate by chapter with Alice’s story ending first, followed by a post-mortem chapter. “After Alice’s death Narcissa had every reason to quit,” Gwartney writes, but “I can’t figure out why she didn’t.” The author describes how the grieving mother “had nothing to give the missionary effort,” but stayed anyway. Whether Gwartney admires her for staying—and whether, by extension, the reader ought to—remains unaddressed as we segue to the raft story. The very next chapter begins “I got out from under my grandfather’s raft.”

On one hand, this is apples and oranges, isn’t it? A recreational river raft trip accident from which everyone emerges unscathed and the loss of a child. If the pairing were strictly a device for building tension, it would fail. But there’s more. “Was it Providence that saved us?” Gwartney asks after she emerges from the river. “Did we live on as evidence of our communion with the West?” That fact that such a thought would arise, right in the middle of a life-or-death crisis, illustrates a peculiar weightiness, a go-to reflex in Westerners—from Narcissa Whitman to Debra Gwartney and beyond—to cleave to belonging. Which is a close cousin of longing. We long to belong. But we aren’t sure we do. Was it providence that saved her? No. She concludes unequivocally. It was not. “I am not one to rely on luck,” she writes.

In fact, luck didn’t save her. Despite the many manly men on the trip, her sister did. This, too, speaks to another theme in the book: the rejection of patriarchal trappings. After the accident, Gwartney refuses to visit the river again. “I knew I’d be told, by the men in my family in particular, that I had to return.” But she knows she won’t. Why? Because “my family’s code was no longer my code. If it ever had been.”

Gwartney doesn’t return to the river, ever, despite chiding from her family. Nor did Narcissa ever return home, back east, though she had the chance. The junctures don’t match up, but the emotionality does. It’s an excellent climax, maybe even a satisfying denouement. But here’s the thing: we’re still only half way through the book.

Gwartney backtracks, revisits the Whitman story again, trying to get details right. “What’s true about the early years of the West, the creation of a regional identity, and what’s not: it’s a jumble of perplexing misinformation.” She also returns to her two grandmothers, specifically to the house where she once lived. “I couldn’t bring back the past that had once taken care of me that made me who I am. These places once so familiar emptied of us. Of me.”

She’s lost the past, yes, and the subtext is clear: all of us have. Western identity is changing; American identity is shifting. If we’re talking about colonialism, it’s bigger yet. Western as in Western Civilization. The stories we’ve been told about the righteousness of the white man’s path that brought us here are crumbling. We are searching. Gwartney is searching. But for what?

Part Four, “Memento Mori,” finds Gwartney looking for something concrete, locks of Narcissa’s hair squirreled away in various archives. If there’s a place where the book’s urgency ebbs, this is it. Though the narrator-researcher feels strongly about the hair locks, as a reader, I did not. Similarly, Gwartney’s story of returning “home” to insist that her grandmother’s ashes end up in Salmon, Idaho, as the grandmother had requested, only to renege on her mission and admit that decades later, she’s still done nothing with them, creates a sense of impotence.

The same sense imbues her conclusions about Narcissa Whitman. As a writer, she set out to portray Narcissa as Narcissa, but she’s exasperated with her failure to capture her. “I’d rarely allowed her to be real, a woman who’d suffered a crippling loneliness, and who died alone. I’d endlessly criticized those who rewrote the history to serve themselves, only to discover my own capacity for doing the same.”

In seeking out stories of lesser-known non-white figures in the history of the West, I’ve often felt the same. (My current project centers on Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the 1870s.) But Gwartney’s self-laceration seems overstated. We’ve watched her consider Narcissa as a multi-dimensional character from page one. She’s simply not as complicit in myth-creation as she worries she is. At least that’s what I want to believe. Of her. Of myself. Of all of us. Yet the strength of I Am a Stranger Here Myself lies precisely here, in Gwartney’s insistent refusal to let herself, or anyone else, off the hook.

In the end Gwartney returns home, yet again, this time with her daughters in tow, to Idaho to scatter her grandfather’s ashes, and faces her father haranguing her, still, to “Vote for the right men, defend the right causes.” The book ends with the image of a buck running from town into the hills—cliché and real at once, as commonplace in the rural West as a person hopping a subway in New York City. The buck runs “to the mountains that surround us, that had always surrounded us, into the trees and across streams and up rocky cliffs and far from human confusions. Away from questions and histories and sorrow.”

*  *  *

Last year, I landed by happenstance in Walla Walla working at Whitman College, a small liberal arts college where the Whitman legacy remains very much in question. The mascot had recently been changed from Missionaries to the Blues (after the nearby mountains). While I lived in town, a statue of Marcus Whitman downtown was splashed with red paint. Drive west eight miles to the Whitman Mission National Historic Site and the shift in perspective shows even more starkly.

New exhibits and a film in the visitor center focus on the establishment of the Waiilatpu Mission as a turning point in the lives of Indians. Even the official National Park Service website forefronts partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and only mentions the Whitmans in the second paragraph, and the daughter, Alice, not at all. The lens through which we view the history of the West is beginning to include experiences besides those of colonizers, a broadening that’s long overdue.

With that in mind, did I wish I Am a Stranger Here Myself was more about the Indians and less about Narcissa Whitman? I did. Probably other readers will, too. But as I’ve mulled my reaction to this gut-honest book, I’ve come to question that wish. Maybe the desire, among descendants of white settlers, to side only with people not our own is, in itself, a kind of reneging, a refusal to look directly at who we are, what we’ve done, why we’re here, what makes us stay, and go.

We are strangers in the West. Like it or not.

It’s not so much that the questions, the histories, the sorrows lie just under the surface; it’s that they are the surface-like layers of decomposing organic matter on the forest floor. The instinct to scrape it all away to get to mineral soil is wrong-minded. Enough white writers have undertaken the native perspective. (I admit I am one of them since my 2015 book Reclaimers told triumphant tales of the Timbisha Shoshone and Maidu tribes reclaiming stolen land from the federal government and a large utility company in California, but did not interrogate the ways I’ve benefitted directly and indirectly from the initial conquest.) So: what about our nonnative legacy? It’s not pretty. It’s not simple. It’s not over. That’s where Gwartney leaves us: firmly grounded and rightly discomfited.

University of New Mexico Press
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Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush

I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we’re animals, that we need the Earth. And that can be devastating.
— Mary Oliver

Most days my wife and I read a book aloud at dinnertime and we each read a book silently at bedtime. Sometimes one book reverberates with the other, cumulatively expanding our consciousness. That happened when we read Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl together and I read Elizabeth Rush’s Rising over the same period. Lab Girl won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Excellence in Science; Rising was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award. The distinctiveness of these awards suggests something about the range each book encompasses.

Early in Rising, looking for signs of risen waters in Louisiana, Elizabeth Rush walks a narrow, single-lane road out to the Isle de Jean Charles, on “the highest and most stubborn spine of land.” What remains of the island is “two miles long and a quarter mile wide. Less than half a century ago, the island was ten times larger.” I’m reminded of two maps in Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article about Louisiana’s “shrinking coast,” one a typical depiction of the parishes along the Gulf of Mexico, the other showing only solid land where rising waters have changed slim peninsulas into archipelagos of tiny, unpopulated islands.

Inevitably, the second map, on which Isle de Jean Charles has no land link to Louisiana, will become the more accurate one. Rush tells us, “Over the past forty years nearly 90 percent of the islanders have moved inland.” On her visit she sees some houses raised onto stilts by determinedly optimistic owners and many more squatting on the ground, abandoned and decaying.

Throughout “Dispatches from the New American Shore,” Rush witnesses climate change’s effect on many coastlines. She visits sites on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts, traveling to Louisiana, Florida, and Maine, to Staten Island in New York, to Alviso and San Francisco in California. In Oregon she charts changes in bird populations as climate change forces various species to abandon familiar terrain and migrate inland. Rising sea levels are the dominant focus of Rising. However, Rush gives breadth and scope to her discoveries in these landscapes; she intersperses longer chapters that record her observations and interactions with shorter chapters centered on testimony from people who study or inhabit these locales, balancing inside perspectives with her outsider point-of-view.

Recalling Wendell Berry’s assertion that “our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other,” Rush wonders, “What happens when we lose sight of the way our culture mirrors the land? What happens when we lose sight of the land altogether?”

Along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, she visits the Exploratorium, a long building “cantilevered out over the bay,” where Fisher Bay Observatory includes an exhibit demonstrating the changes the shoreline has undergone during the city’s development. The place where she and her guide stand, she learns, would have been twice as far out into the bay in 1848 than it is today, thanks to the relentless filling in of wetlands. She tells us, “When I think of Wendell Berry and the Embarcadero, open water less than two centuries ago, I can see what ought to be obvious: we shouldn’t be standing here in the first place.”

A transformable topographical map shows her not only what the terrain was like sixteen thousand years ago but also how an imminent two-foot rise in sea level will affect the coastline: “The few current pockets of affordability—Alviso, Redwood City, Fremont, Richmond, and East Palo Alto—are all underwater, as are portions of Oakland, Marin County, and downtown San Francisco. What we think of as the coastline is a blur.” She writes, “In the time it has taken me to write this book, the predicted rise by century’s end has doubled. If sea level rise continues to accelerate at even half this speed we are looking at an increase of well over ten feet in the next eighty years.”

In an afterword Rush observes, “Since the rise of scientific rationalism, our particular brand of western knowledge has lulled us into thinking that we are separate from nature. . . . But now climate change is calling us to attention, drawing us to the water’s edge to ask with wonderment and fear whether there is, or ever really was, something that separates us from our environment.” Her travels along the new American shore confirm that we’re not separate at all.

*  *  *

In Lab Girl, Hope Jahren traces her personal history as a scientist as well as her career-long friendship with a co-worker while she simultaneously writes insightfully about the life of plants. Structurally, Jahren does on a personal level what Rush does on a more reportorial level—interweaving short botanical chapters with longer chapters chronicling her expanding understanding of her research in the natural world.

A subtext tracking climate change runs through Lab Girl, but it’s mostly subtle and subdued. In the prologue, she tells us, “People don’t know how to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one. In the last ten years, we’ve cut down more than fifty billion trees.” Every ten years, she explains, we remove an amount of forest equivalent to “a land area the size of France.” But her approach to this issue takes a different tack than Rush’s more journalistic approach. Jahren quietly attempts to bring us closer to the world of plants by building a relationship, partly by modeling her own connection with them and partly by leading us to understand and appreciate the natural world more thoroughly. Her prologue ends with dramatizing how she looks at leaves and asking questions:

I start by looking at the color: Exactly what shade of green? Top different from the bottom? Center different from the edges? And what about the edges? Smooth? Toothed? How hydrated is the leaf? Limp? Wrinkled? Flush? What is the angle between the leaf and the stem? How big is the leaf? Bigger than my hand? Smaller than my fingernail? Edible? Toxic? How much sun does it get? How often does the rain hit it? Sick? Healthy? Important? Irrelevant? Alive? Why?

Jahren begins the personal memoir thread of the book with the first chapter. She chronicles her immersion in the scientific world from childhood through midlife career, often interspersing short plant-centered chapters among them. In one she talks about a tree she felt she had a special relationship with; in another she begins, “A seed knows how to wait”; in yet another she discusses the risks roots take.

The sections of the book—“Roots and Leaves,” “Wood and Knots,” “Flowers and Fruit”—present botany and zoology as mirrors of growth and purpose through mutual lifetimes. The human memoir of Jahren’s life is often funny, admirable for her ability to chart her intellectual and psychological growth; she presents herself not as flawless but as capable of growth and maturity.

Her epilogue reminds us,

Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not.

In the end, she confesses, “My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.”

Together these two books offer powerful examples of the ways creative or literary nonfiction educates readers; their authors also bring awareness to the ways events and ideas affect their personal observations. A reader coming to Lab Girl in hopes of discovering a scientist’s memoir will gain deeper insights about the natural world; a reader coming to Rising in hopes of finding a travel narrative will meet a range of speakers whose testimony will bring her deeper into the personal impacts of events.

Literary nonfiction often draws its power from refusing to simply be just one thing, one strictly practiced subgenre, one narrowly directed text. In these two engaging, intimate, and lyrically expressed explorations of the natural world we gain more than story—we gain insight simultaneously into the relationship between the individual and the world we all inhabit.

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Alfred A. Knopf
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Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention by David Shields

Since the 2016 election, most of us have made up our minds about President Donald J. Trump. He’s either shrewd or incompetent. And, as a human being, either noble or immoral. Thus, according to polls (and my family’s political rifts), these dichotomies have left us with our nation’s “great divide.”

However, in spite of my belief that Trump is incompetent and immoral, I wonder whether I would have picked up David Shields’s Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump on my own; I fear there is nothing more to say about the president other than, in my opinion, he’s incompetent and immoral. I only needed to hear him brag, “You can grab their pussy,” and then watch as he continued his campaign to make my decision.

Shields’s book begins with commentary from multiple directions. I struggled to find connections. First, he writes about what a professional mediator of injury cases explained about plaintiffs being convinced their lives were perfect before an accident—and the job of convincing them of the errors in their thinking. Next, he jumps to a direct quote from Trump: “When somebody says something personal about me, I hate them for the rest of my life. It’s probably wrong, but I hate people. Do you understand that? I hate ’em. I never recover from it.”

Then, we come to a Noam Chomsky quote about how impossible it is to explain human behavior. And next, another seemingly random quote from Trump: “I like to pride myself on rolling with the punches.” He declares this during a conversation about Citizen Kane—Trump’s favorite movie—with the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, which ends up with Morris asking Trump, “If you could give Charles Foster Kane advice, what would you say to him?” Trump answers: “Get yourself a different woman,” more superficial understanding.

Shields sums up this dialogue by commenting, with noticeable irritation: “(He’s kind of getting it, he’s getting it, he’s really getting it; forget it, he doesn’t get it.)”

However, Shields’s comment about what Trump has said and how Shields is interpreting Trump’s responses are rare. For the most part, Shields just presents the material and leaves conclusions for readers to make. Any commentary by Shields appears to be whatever he has found that will feed the discussion at hand. And it is an intellectual discussion, although readable. Shields’s intellect is vast. I find it challenging, and I find it fun.

Shields takes an accumulate-the-evidence approach to substantiate Trump’s absurdities and faults and uncovers a few explanations for these things from Trump’s past. Rather than clone what has already been documented—tweets and news reports, from right-leaning and left-leaning sources—Shields racks up an alternative collection of sources to support his thesis. This wide range of quotable material is, in part, what has me turning the pages: I’m on alert to see who the next messenger is as well as what they will reveal about Trump.

A few examples of the array of Shields’s sources: Sean Hannity and Donald Rumsfeld (off-air conversation from an anonymous Fox News source); Peter Sagal, Paula Poundstone, and Helen Hong of NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!; a childhood friend talking about Mary Anne Trump, Donald’s mother; a tweet about Lena Dunham; Trump on The Howard Stern Show; and appearances by Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, and RuPaul. There are many literary, science, and other sources as well.

While reading this book, I also felt driven to return to Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010). That bestseller is similar to Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: It’s a list-like argument. Shields lays out his case, that fiction is a trivial form and citing sources as they arise is unnecessary. In Reality Hunger, there are no sources cited until the back of the book. This created more tension for me as I guessed who said what and plowed ahead doubting my literary intellect. However, in Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump, Shields isn’t making a point about citing sources, and most quotations’ origins are revealed in the text as well as listed in the back.

One characteristic of Shields’s writing that stops me and pulls me away from his ideas are the assumptions behind his bold claims that he drops in as simple opinions. For example, “In the last episode of (the actually not very good series) Gypsy, Naomi Watts, playing a crazy shrink (is there any other kind), says something that I nevertheless find useful. . . .” I disagreed with both parenthetical assumptions and was left questioning how and what I was missing. Surely Shields doesn’t believe he’s so entitled that his opinions are indisputable. I reread these numerous times and the rereading settled nothing for me.

Shields often loads his approach with sudden, blatant honesty, which leads to self-revealing moments that lend a fuller understanding of him and Trump. This is demonstrated when Shields addresses bullying. “In my academic life, I’ve encountered at least three psychopathic bullies; I capitulated to their demands because they had something I wanted/needed. . . . What, precisely, does Trump have that anybody wants or needs? Why have bullies targeted me throughout my life? My reluctance, due to my stutter, to be directly confrontational? What’s everyone else’s excuse?”

Happily, there are moments that made me smile, relief offered by Shields’s purposeful structure, sprinkling these gems throughout.

TRUMP: When people say something false, I attack those people. I think more people should have that attitude. I think you’d find a lot more accurate reporting, including yours.

 

CHARLES FELDMAN (CNN): What was inaccurate so far?

 

TRUMP: I thought your demeanor was inaccurate.

Did I come to new conclusions? Not really. Did I gain insights? I believe I did. But these are hard to describe. They will take a few more readings to clarify. It’s part of the fun of Shields’s work. He shares a lot of what he knows and has figured out, and for me, at least, it’s more than I can absorb without diving back in. I believe it’s worth getting soaked a few times to make sense of as many of his ideas as I can. I love the stimulation, and I feel I come out a bit smarter every time I read him.

Thought Catalog Books
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All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer by Karen Babine

Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers captures the disorientation we feel when faced with this most ordinary, yet extraordinary, of shocks: the mortality of those dearest to us. Intellectually, we know we all must die, but when the reality of death hovers over our own families, our foundation trembles. When Babine’s mother is diagnosed with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare cancer, Babine feels untethered. These short, meditative essays span the eight months of her mother’s recovery, as Babine intimately traces her interior journey, cooks for her mother, and tries to find some solid ground.

Babine tries to place her experience in a larger context: she meanders through reflections on Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and C.S. Lewis’s writing on grief—as well as the inequities in the health care system, the environmental consequences of popular farming practices, the philosophers Kierkegaard’s and Camus’s responses to absurdity, the science of why mint feels cold on our lips. But faced with her mother’s cancer, intellect alone cannot offer her comfort or provide answers. She admits, “fully understanding . . .  is not possible.”

She also can’t find comfort by shaping her experience into a traditional story arc. The story does not rely on suspense. We know her mother will live, and her survival depends not on her fight, but on rest. “This is how we survive: We don’t struggle. We still.” The book is not driven by family drama; Babine comes from a close, affectionate family, and if they have any intimate secrets, she keeps them private. Most of all, she resists the temptation to simplify her experience into inspiring lessons, the “What cancer taught me” tropes.

Three-fourths of the way through the book, the spot where a reader generally expects an inspiring revelation, Babine refuses to comfort us. Her mother has been suffering in bed for days following her latest chemo treatment, and Babine writes,

This is the way we think about illness, about suffering, about crucibles, the goal of which is to come out on the other side with some sort of transcendent knowledge, a revelation, an epiphany, an arc toward recognizing how different we are now from who we were before cancer. But that’s ridiculous. We want that bright shining epiphany, but we don’t get it.

I suspect that in the past, research and storytelling have been some of Babine’s most faithful tools to steady herself during difficult times. But now they are not enough. Babine must seek other ways to keep herself tethered during this bewildering period.

First, Babine finds sustenance in language itself. For example, she loves the gender-neutral name for nieces and nephews: niblings. “I find this delightful, the sounds of it rolling on my tongue.” She is amused that she is a PANK, Professional Aunt, No Children. She collects brightly colored cast-iron cookware and, as if they were members of the family, gives them names: Agnes, Estelle, Minnie, Phillis, Penelope Pumpkin. “Perhaps the silly naming counteracted so much unknowing around me.” As readers, we also sense that the process of writing—the careful, honest naming of her experience—provides solid earth on which she can stand.

During this time, Babine also feels stabilized by the solidity of objects. She scours thrift stores for her favorite cookware and other treasures, especially those with a weighty sense of history. Of her orange cast-iron skillet, Agnes, she writes, “[She] is a delicious constant in a world where nothing makes sense anymore.” Babine explains to those readers who might accuse her of materialism:

We tend to disparage the pleasure of things, the joy we gain from objects, but in their best sense, things are icons. In the tradition of religious iconography of Orthodox Christianity, icons are windows between ourselves and God, the invisible webs of connection we need when the world tilts sideways.

Babine is soothed by cooking: the aromas, the color of the vegetables, the weight of the pan in her hand, the transformation by heat, the task of finding just the right food for her mother’s chemo-ravaged taste buds. On her mother’s birthday, when she is too ill for her scheduled treatment, Babine writes, “On days like this, I need the physicality of cooking: I need the tension of a spatula through a cake batter, I need the action on the surface of a simmer, I need the chop.”

Babine also basks in the continuity cooking represents. As a multi-generational Minnesotan, she shares stories of recipes inherited from her German and Swedish ancestors, the same recipes she passes on to her niblings. She feels fastened in time by her long family history and held in place by her web of community, those friends and neighbors who arrive on the family’s doorstep with lasagna, roast beef, squash, and potatoes.

She searches for patterns that might hint at some undergirding spiritual foundation. After she returns from a funeral of a friend, she says, “I need to believe in patterns beyond my human understanding.” She knows some of her conclusions may be questionable: is there really meaning in the fact her beloved aunt dies the same day her nephew is born? Still, she has moments of certainty. Slicing open a cabbage, she sees “the hidden patterns and swirls in the packed leaves” and is certain it is “too beautiful to be accidental.”

Babine’s essays reference Lutheran traditions and are imbued with a sense of the sacred. But in the same way Babine pushes against narrative structure, she also resists any particular spiritual framework or religious rhetoric. She wants to honor the spaces of unknowing. Faced with the mystery of her mother’s cancer, she is repelled by simple, saccharine prayer memes. Nor does she feel she can place her full faith in what she calls the Miracle of Modern Medicine. She concludes, “So I put my trust in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible instead.”

That last quip is funny, but it suggests more than the worship of buttercream frosting. This is Babine’s religion: Admit what you don’t understand. Do humble tasks with attention. Tend to one another with love. Pay attention to a world in which we “find the divine in an ordinary salad of cucumber, tomatoes, and onions on a Tuesday night, a moment where the individuality of cancer meets a community who will not let you walk this path alone.”

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Mine by Sarah Viren

Winner of the 2017 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

Sarah Viren’s debut collection explores the concept of ownership. It begins with an essay on the ownership of material goods—the narrator’s landlord lends her the furniture that belongs to a man on trial for murder. The essays that follow ask what it means to own one’s body, one’s family members, one’s language, even one’s story that is inextricably intertwined with the stories of others.

Varied in form, infused with layers of careful research on topics such as hands, folk songs, biblical history, and ancient myths, the essays also document Viren’s journey from her work as a reporter into her work as an essayist. Indeed, throughout the book Viren investigates the nature of possession with both the tenacity of a savvy journalist and the instincts of an essayist, hungry for the story beneath the story. This combination makes Mine an energetic and thoughtful read. Viren risks a deeper inquiry with these essays, beyond journalistic investigation, and, as she puts it, she lets her subject in. She has a stake.

In one of the book’s most powerful essays, “My Choice,” we follow the young reporter pitching and pursuing a story for the Galveston County Daily News, the paper where she works, to cover the Focus on the Family “Love Won Out” conversion-therapy conference. We follow her objective inquiry and respectful reporting, and—what is unique about this essay—we also follow the essayistic narrator who is looking back and interrogating the journalistic assignment, a narrator with personal stake as a lesbian, examining the nature of choice, of change, of reportage itself. Even in fact-based reportage, Viren shows that there is always subjective choice in where the light is shone: at the close of this essay, as she is leaving the conversion-therapy conference, preparing to file her story for the next day’s issue, she knows she will end the feature by highlighting two protesters she meets, two girls who infiltrated the conference so they could rush the stage and kiss. “That was my choice,” she writes.

The collection moves in loose chronological order through shifts in the restless narrator’s life as she moves from Tampa to Galveston to Guatemala to Iowa to Lubbock, pursuing a writing career, as a reporter and a freelancer, and a relationship—and then, once in a committed partnership, pursuing motherhood. As the book unfolds, we have a narrator who is ceaselessly trying to understand others, herself, and her world as she seeks to own her own life, fully inhabit and love it—indeed, take possession of it.

Possession is a subject here, but not a simple one; Viren questions the limits of ownership, of claims over even our own children and our own bodies. She asks how her wife can become her not-wife merely by crossing a boundary into a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage. Who has real jurisdiction over what she can call “hers”? She asks how this child that has incubated in her as part of her body for so many months can then become not hers, no longer part of her. “These things pulse up against each other,” she writes, “life and death, beginnings and endings, what we call ours but is never really ours to begin with.” She suggests that we are perhaps more so stewards, or caretakers, of the people and things that belong to us than we are owners.

And as Viren seeks a family and home and job she can call her own, she also asks what to make of her obligation to others? To what degree is their suffering also hers? Or their stories? When Viren parallels her sister’s birthing story with her own, she not only examines the territorial nature of family stories, but she also enters into the stories of strangers.

She becomes obsessed with a woman who posts free stuff on Freecycle, “fascinated by the way her posts could construct a life”; she writes to a woman who is serving life in prison for killing her children; she listens regularly to the advice radio show of Doctora Isabel—self-described as the “‘Latina version of Dr. Laura, Dr. Ruth, Ann Landers, and Dr. Spock’”—ostensibly to work on her Spanish vocabulary but, eventually it’s clear, she’s seeking advice, seeking connection with lives outside her own.

Reading the riveting first essay “My Murderer’s Couch,” I was drawn in by the series of strange events that landed Viren sleeping on a futon that belonged to Robert Durst as he went on trial for the well-publicized murder (and dismemberment) of Morris Black. I was further taken with the quality of the narrator’s perspective: this was a narrator for whom the jury was always still out on people who were quickly condemned and neatly categorized by others.

As Viren covers the police beat in her new job with the Galveston County Daily News, she must fraternize with police chiefs who are obsessed with Durst, primarily, from her perspective, because he dressed in drag, not because he was accused of chopping up a murder victim. “But for me,” Viren writes,

Durst’s redeeming quality was the fact that he had cross-dressed. It made him an outsider, which was something I understood—as a journalist, as a woman, and, though I told none of the chiefs, as a lesbian living and working in a place where local politicians still remained in the closet. . . . All this, coupled with the fact that I slept on Durst’s futon, ate at his kitchen table, watched his TV, meant that I found myself taking Durst’s side, in small ways, in brief moments like this one where someone like the chief asked me to call Durst a freak.

She excuses us neither from responsibility for our actions nor from owning up to our own capacity to do harm. Later, as a college professor teaching a course on true crime, she asks her students why we read books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: “[T]hey quite smartly say, ‘So that we can know that we are not murderers.’ But after a pause one of them adds, ‘Also, to remind us that we might have been, or could still be.’”

Mine is a strong debut collection. At turns funny, brash, heartbreaking, Viren is always, it seems to me, honest as she crafts essays that reveal to herself, and to us, that one of life’s main lessons is that nothing we so badly desire truly belongs to us: “Least of all, this fleetingly small and insignificant life.” Viren’s essays do what the best nonfiction does: they transform the story that is hers into a story that becomes all of ours.

Mine by Sarah Viren

University of New Mexico Press
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