What’s Hidden Beneath

What’s Hidden Beneath

by | Oct 7, 2022 | Book Reviews

By David MacWilliams

on Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson

Her father’s suicide in December of 2008 leaves poet Juliet Patterson in a state of grief and bewilderment. To understand his choice, she begins to mine her family history—both her grandfathers also died by their own hands—and the history of the men’s shared hometown, Pittsburgh, Kansas, as well as the region around it, Crawford County, a place where abandoned coal mines pockmark the landscape with sinkholes. In her memoir, Sinkhole, Patterson explores the potential causes of the suicides in her family and the links between suicide and the historical moments, geography, and personal lives that are inextricably bound to one another. Her project, however, develops into an exploration of the responses suicide creates in survivors. Her memoir is grounded firmly in strenuous research, honest assessments of family members, and a narrative style that is intimate and engaging.

To better understand the legacy of suicide in her family, Patterson brings to bear the skills of a researcher, interviewer, and poet. In the most moving passages in the book, she imaginatively recreates the final hours of each suicide to better convey the human anguish. Her approach to the topic, though, is broad. She examines the familial and public archives of both sides of the family, interviews family members and historians, and reads countless newspaper articles and treatises on suicide to understand why the men in her family killed themselves. Why do people choose to end their lives, and what influences, if any, might the current history and the geography of place have in such decisions? She also learns about the reactions of the survivors in her family and how each in her or his way avoided facing the suicide.

The suicides in her family surprised the widows and family members left behind. The men planned their deaths in silence—and that silence lingers. The wives of the deceased grandfathers avoid discussing their husbands, just as Patterson’s mom is also inclined after her husband James dies. Patterson raises the topics of erasure and reticence repeatedly. For instance, she reflects upon the silence her parents maintained over their fathers’ suicides. “If we rarely talked about important things,” she writes, “it was next to never that I heard them discuss their childhoods or my grandfathers.”

She recovers the lost pasts of the dead men because she recognizes that their deaths haven’t erased them. In her poem “Dark Scaffolding” from her collection entitled Threnody (Nightboat, 2016), Patterson’s speaker muses on the passage of time and on the presence of that past. “Things have already happened / before we were here. That was now.” The sentiment behind that last phrase, “that was now,” resonates throughout this memoir. She reminds us that while the past had its immediacy to those who lived it, the consequences of the past don’t go away. Even if past actions are not discussed, their impact remains.

Patterson laces her memoir with imagery that is stark and real. She interrogates what she observes. Patterson and her mother go to view the father’s body for the first time at a funeral home the day after James, her dad, hung himself. A fraught few minutes pass as the mother paces before the body, demanding to know why. Patterson stays with her father’s body after her mother leaves the viewing room.

With my mother out of the room, I felt more relaxed, despite the difficulty of the moment. I stood up and moved close enough to touch the body. His hand first: cold. And then his head. He was gone. He did not exist. A feeling of immense sadness that I could not control welled up and caused me to emit a strange sound, something like a sob. I studied his face. His mouth twisted in a small grimace, and there were still traces of what I can only describe as determination across his brow. It struck me that I had seen hints of this expression in him many times before, though never so precisely. I closed my eyes for a moment. An image of a noose appeared, as though lying in wait. I opened my eyes. Without thinking, I lifted the cloth away from his neck. I had an impulse to know in more detail the circumstances of his death, to understand in clear terms the consequences on his body. The worst had already happened, so why not face it as best I could? Later I read the coroner’s report and learned the marks were consistent with two separate ligature furrows, with two individual nooses. It was a gruesome sight. I covered him as quickly as I could. I heard myself mutter I’m sorry in an audible whisper, not so much an apology as a groan. I stepped out of the room.

Besides the stark imagery, Patterson employs extended metaphor and symbolism throughout the memoir to link her topics. Plastic bags and boxes are filled and emptied; common place items like duct tape, a pocket knife, a wristwatch, and receipts suddenly emerge as significant, haunting artifacts; notes are left behind; family photographs are examined in ekphrastic passages where memory and imagination meld; road trips are taken, sometimes without return. The most striking metaphor of all is the sinkhole.

In Patterson’s memoir, sinkholes are metaphorical—vast spaces of emptiness that we’ve created, and that inevitably rise from below, revealing old damage and creating new damage when they emerge, like unspoken secrets no longer silent. Patterson makes many trips from her home in Minnesota to her parents’ hometown in Kansas. On one trip she drives over to one grandmother’s former house just to have a look at the place, and she’s stunned and frightened by the sinkhole she encounters across the street. She finds a house cordoned off that has been moved from its foundation in the yard to the sidewalk because its “basement [was] crumbling into a gaping, cavernous sinkhole.” The image is alarming, and it becomes the seed for the extended metaphor of sinkholes Patterson uses in her book.

            The hole was frighteningly deep. From where I stood, it looked as if the lawn had been punched with a massive awl, exposing the ground’s secret interior. A mass of shrubs had been pulled into the void, littering the rim with branches and leaves, while broken concrete, pipe, and wire beetled everywhere. I had never seen anything like it. The terrifying, alien world of a sinkhole—the earth turning in on itself—an obvious metaphor. One I couldn’t ignore.

That morning, staring at the hole, I felt as if I was looking into a realm that I could not enter. A world of dark earth, of broken rocks and minerals, of air and water, all the things that had always been there and would always be there—but which we don’t very often consider, and the sight of which, for some reason, made my hands tremble. I looked down to see the fencing tremble, my fingers wrapped in its mesh.

Suicide is terrifying to the survivors, a “world of dark earth,” in a way. To enter that realm, to face it, she examines the surviving family members’ responses to suicide. Their responses take one of two paths, silence or narrative. While poring over her father’s papers, Patterson finds notes James made attributing his dad’s death not to suicide, but to murder. James had attempted to impose a narrative of shady characters and criminal enterprise onto his father’s death in order, Patterson claims, to reject the suicide. He was eight when his dad shot himself, and even in his older age, James was unwilling to accept his dad’s death as a suicide. Why, Patterson wonders, was her father so resistant to his dad’s suicide when evidence pointed to that manner of death?

            So why did my father believe in his theory of murder, however untenable some of its conjectures might have been? The violence and disruption of his [James’s] past, maybe, growing up in the shadows of Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the historically violent and chaotic culture of Crawford County. But more, I think, because believing [his dad] Edward was murdered would have made it easier to avoid the questions a loss by suicide might present. Under what circumstances, if any, does suicide make sense? Under what circumstances, if any, is it an appropriate thing to do? Is life itself worth having? Is the fact that you’re alive a good thing?

He wasn’t the only one who avoided the subject. After Edward’s death, my grandmother Leah did everything she could to put him behind her. In the weeks following the funeral, as she sorted through business affairs and began coping with the reality of supporting a family, she stopped talking about her husband. What happens, I wondered, to a child whose father literally and figuratively disappears?

James faced that “world of dark earth” by building a narrative which restored his father to a loving man and public servant (he’d formerly been a U.S. congressman), a man who wouldn’t abandon his family. The question underlying Patterson’s memoir is not why do some people kill themselves; rather, it is how do the survivors make sense of their death? If it’s true they wanted it, then how do we create a mental structure around it to withstand the chaos, the shame, the abandonment that a suicide generates? The answer frequently is that we don’t apply words to it or we don’t talk about it. We shut our mouths in a tacit agreement with the deceased; we will collaborate in their disappearance. Or like James, we’ll make up a fiction and thereby deny the suicide. Both responses are harmful because they avoid the truth. Better to face it and name it, Patterson seems to say, than to let the truth—even if it can never be fully known—sink into some dark void.

Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson

Milkweed
 $25.00 Hardcover  | Buy Now

David MacWilliams earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Ashland University, Ohio in 2011. His creative nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Pilgrimage, Mason’s Road, Apple Valley Review, Creative Nonfiction, the tiny journal and elsewhere. He blogs at https://wordpress.com/home/oldageandgravity.blog. He lives in Cloudcroft, New Mexico with his wife.

A Strangely Beautiful Remembrance

A Strangely Beautiful Remembrance

by | Sep 11, 2022 | Book Reviews

By Mark Neely

on Let Me Count the Ways by Tomás Q. Morín

“I can’t remember how old I was the first time I saw my father cook,” writes Tomás Q. Morín in his gripping memoir about growing up in a small town in South Texas. In another family’s story we might find the father manning the grill at a barbecue. But in this case, the elder Morín is huddled in the passenger seat of the family car, and instead of flipping burgers, he is cooking heroin. The opening chapters of Let Me Count the Ways describe Morín’s complicated relationship with his father, a master bricklayer with “the body of an ox” and an outsized personality, a man his son both idolizes and fears becoming.

As a boy, Morín accompanies his parents on their Friday night drives, where his father exchanges his weekly pay for drugs. The young Tomás is taught to act as a lookout, to shout “Chota!” if he sees an unmarked cruiser, of which “black wall tires, too many antennas, and extra-dark tint were the telltale signs.” He also cares for his father on the weekends he can’t score, helping him through withdrawal by pressing wet towels to his forehead, or accompanying his parents on their frequent trips to local hospitals—there, the doctors immediately recognize the man’s symptoms, but “pretend that what was happening wasn’t really happening.” It is indicative of Morín’s chaotic childhood that he felt most at ease the nights they left his father at the hospital since he knew that he “would live through the night.” It falls to Tomás and his mother to try and hide “the town’s worst-kept secret: my mom, a college-educated woman from a respectable family, had chosen to make a life with a handsome, charismatic drug addict.”

It isn’t long before the family falls apart, and Morín eventually becomes “a bastard with three fathers.” The memoir also tells the story of two other men who parent him after his biological father abandons him. The second of these is Morín’s grandfather, a stern man capable of both tenderness and fits of violence. In one scene, Tomás sits on his grandfather’s lap watching him fold a cigarette filter into a tiny dove. In another, the grandfather lashes the boy with a bull whip when he tracks dirt into the kiddie pool. Even at his most loving, the grandfather sometimes teaches dangerous lessons. After his grandson ignores the fire ants biting his legs so he can finish clearing weeds from a ditch, the grandfather takes pride in the fact that Tomás has ignored his pain in order to complete the task at hand. “Mijo es hombre,” he says, a word that weighs on Morín for much of his life:

That moment, when he called me a man for the first time, rippled far into the future,when I refused to cry at his funeral, when for years I would let my depression go undiagnosed and cripple me emotionally. When he dropped the word hombre into the lake of my life, its rings spread silently into a future I couldn’t imagine.

Morín is an accomplished poet (Machete, Patient Zero) and translator (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) who often turns to metaphor as a way to order and explain the world around him. His father in jail resembles “a dog chained to a tree after only ever having run through fields,” and when a teenaged Tomás also gets in trouble with the law, he watches his mother from his holding cell while she talks with an officer. “After she heard the charges,” he writes, “her face broke like a pie dropped on the ground.” His vivid imagination also allows him to picture a world in which he and his father reconcile. In one of the book’s most beautiful passages, Morín comes across a Jackson Pollack painting in a museum and imagines what it would be like to share the experience with his father:

He would study the painting as I told him about Pollack’s technique, how they both worked with a cigarette dangling from their lips, one dripping cement, the other paint. I would mention Pollack’s trouble with alcohol, and the affairs, too. This would endear Pollack to him, would make him one more fellow builder groping for love through the fog of his life.

Running parallel with these family stories is an examination of Morín’s struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder. The title, Let Me Count the Ways, refers to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet, and describes the difficult love Morín feels for the men who fathered him. But it also alludes to his OCD symptoms, which include eye-blinking, skin-picking, intrusive thoughts, and counting everything from the spoons at a restaurant to the stripes on a stranger’s shirt.

In one chapter, he quotes from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which notes that a compulsive behavior is typically “not an end in itself, but is designed to produce or prevent some future event or situation.” One might be tempted to tie the chaos and uncertainty of Morín’s early life to his later illness, but he doesn’t dwell on the causes of his OCD, which are, of course, uncertain. Instead, he attempts to show readers what it is like to live with a condition that gives him a heightened awareness of the world that can be both exhilarating and debilitating.

Some of the most memorable scenes in Let Me Count the Ways describe Morín’s relationship with a neighbor, a man named Jackie, who takes Tomás under his wing after his biological father leaves him. Jackie is brilliant but troubled, laid low by addiction, and lives in a house with no electricity or running water, relying on an outhouse hidden in the woods behind his backyard and cooking shoplifted meat over an outdoor fire. He calls Tomás “grasshopper” and envisions himself as a kind of sensei to the boy. He teaches him to play chess, encourages his work in school, and advises him about his future. At times he does seem to have prophetic powers as in this bit of conversation:

“Will you promise me something, Mas?”

“Sure Jack. What is it?”

“If you ever become a writer, write about all of this. Don’t leave anything out, okay?”

Of this moment, Morín says, “No one had ever said I could be a writer, much less just assumed it. The idea had never crossed my mind.” Capturing everyday speech, as in the snippet just quoted, is one of Morín’s gifts: His expertly written dialogue captures the experience of growing up between two languages and the complexities of characters who can, thereby, be deeply flawed. Hearing their voices, which modulate between love and anger, bravado and hopelessness, the author lets us see them as complex human beings, and allows them to transcend the categories where we often place people in order to dismiss them: addict, convict, laborer, deadbeat dad. Let Me Count the Ways is a strange and beautiful remembrance of loss, pain, betrayal, and regeneration, one that describes familial love in all its complexity and argues that even the most troubled among us are worthy of dignity.

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill, and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and a senior editor at River Teeth. 

One Woman’s Testament to Why ‘Home’ Eludes Us

One Woman’s Testament to Why ‘Home’ Eludes Us

by | Jul 15, 2022 | Book Reviews

By Ashley Espinoza

on This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou

This Way Back is a collection of seventeen essays about identity. Joanna Eleftheriou was born in New York City, partially raised there and partially raised on the Greek island of Cyprus; she struggles to accept her identity as an American and a Cypriot, a lesbian, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and one who lives on the southern half island under the control of the Cypriot government whose origins are Greek.

Eleftheriou looks deeply into the history of her family and the history of Cyprus. In her essay “The Other Side,” she takes a trip to the Green Line, the neutral zone between the Cypriot south and the Turkish north, occupied by that country for over thirty years. In 2003 the Green Line was opened that allowed people of the south to visit those of the north. Many families were able to see homes and land, which they’d left behind. Eleftheriou is hesitant to visit and examines why she feels a sense of betrayal and fear, knowing that her father saw Turkey as the enemy. She visits this neutral zone and buys a map in Greek and Turkish. She thinks about how Turks and Greeks eat the same foods, though the foods have different names. She thinks about her identity in a country that has been torn apart by people before she was even born.

Eleftheriou sees the world around her and herself all at once. She isn’t just a woman traveling to the Green Line. She is a woman who has lost half of the island even though she wasn’t born to witness it herself. She feels that loss through her father and through her Cypriot Greek friends who conceal their identity. She aches for the part of the land she’s never seen, as if her ancestors are with her. To Eleftheriou the Green Line is not some tourist place to visit; it’s a part of her past that was taken away and will likely never be given back. She even examines her family wishes that Crypto Greeks get their land back and wonders where will the Crypto Turks go.

In addition to her identity as a Cypriot Greek, Eleftheriou is a lesbian, a fact she slowly comes to terms with. Through her younger years she tried to push being gay away because of her religion and because of the anti-gay culture in Cyprus. Her essay “Cyprus Pride” grapples with that question as she watches videos of violence from Cyprus’s first Gay Pride.

In America, Eleftheriou is able to openly discuss her love for women. Her Greek Orthodox priest, by contrast, compares being gay to being deformed. She thinks back to her history books when babies born with imperfections were left to die. She ponders if she would have been left to die if it was possible to know she was gay as a baby. She knew her religion didn’t accept her and saw her sexuality as something wrong with her; in fact, the priest’s words were directed at her. After watching the videos of the Cyprus pride parade, Eleftheriou says to a friend, “I was trying to decide whether to give up my Orthodox faith or renounce my love of women and remain celibate, because there aren’t any people who are Orthodox and gay.”

Her friend gives the simple yet complicated answer that Eleftheriou could be the first Greek Orthodox who is gay. When she accepts herself as gay and visits her first gay bar in Greece someone asks here where she is from. She finally understood how to answer the question. She is from New York and Cyprus, American and Cypriot. Though she doesn’t explicitly write this, it’s a metaphor for her being gay (tolerated in the U.S.) and Greek Orthodox (forbidden).

Even though the book’s essays are not in chronological order and do not add up to a full-length memoir, Eleftheriou’s primary theme is clear—her thoughts about identity. In each essay she tries to find her way back. But to where? She isn’t sure if she has found her way back to an actual home or if home is an illusion. She writes about a discussion with a student in regards to the title of her book.

I told her that when I gave my manuscript the title This Way Back, I couldn’t even figure out if it meant my attempt to get to ancestral Greek lands, back to New York where I was born, or whether it just meant that I had been saddled with a restless sense that the home I have to get back to is always somewhere else.

The collection begins with her father’s death, the emotional crux of most of the essays even if he isn’t present in each one. It feels as if Eleftheriou had to grieve his death before she could write about her childhood. Though the opening essay of this book shows us her father’s death, she doesn’t discuss its aftermath until the end of the book. Rather, in between, she explores her childhood. It isn’t until the last few essays that Joanna returns to his death and how she had to handle his property once he was gone.

In her essay “Inheritance Law,” she discovers that she is entitled to not only the house her father bought in Cyprus but also a piece of land. The land, however, is essentially worth nothing; it’s in the middle of nowhere and barren. Still, she cannot let the land go as it would be against her father’s wishes and against what he worked for—to keep the land in the family. Inheritance law isn’t only about what Eleftheriou is entitled to as her father’s daughter, but she interprets that as an inheritance-like metaphor for being gay. She realizes that writers before her who were gay broke the silence in order that she, too, might come out.

In her essay “Unsent Letter to My Father,” she writes poignantly,

Dad, I would love to have loved young. But my love is for the stars, for the ocean, and words, my work. And if I have learned anything at all about love, it’s that love requires melting, a smallness and wonder at the magnificence of all the world. If I learn to love nobody else, I want to learn to love my father, and if I’ve learned anything yet about love, it’s that a grudge can poison all goodness. I am writing to learn to forgive, to be forgiven.

This Way Back has a special way that Joanna Eleftheriou relates her essays to her multiple identities—a lesbian, an American, a Cypriot, and a daughter trying to honor her father. Each essay holds all of these topics but through the lens of each one’s larger discussion. She ties this all together and ends her book with “The Epilogue: Moonlight Elegy”: “I don’t know how to love a man, not even a father.”

This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou

West Virginia University Press
 $23.99 Paperback  | Buy Now

Ashley Espinoza received her MFA from the University of Nebraska and her work has been published in Assay, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Bending Genres, and Hobart among other places. She is a nonfiction editor for The Good Life Review and reads for The Forge Literary Magazine. She is currently working on a memoir.

A Life, A Marriage, A Family—Intentionally Chosen

A Life, A Marriage, A Family—Intentionally Chosen

by | Jun 14, 2022 | Book Reviews

By Jessie van Eerden

American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation by Sarah M. Wells

In American Honey, a memoir-in-essays, Sarah Wells tells the story of a woman becoming a whole version of herself while navigating marriage and embracing a definition of love that abides mistakes and failures. These interconnected essays present a portrait of a self who is committed to deep relationships with others (husband, children, parents, coworkers) and invested in the bonds of love, place, and work as well as the intentionality required to preserve those at-times fragile bonds.

Wells is committed to writing from a Christian perspective; her previous books include The Family Bible Devotional: Stories from the Bible to Help Kids and Parents Engage and Love Scripture (Our Daily Bread) and the poetry collections Between the Heron and the Moss (Dreamseeker Books) and Pruning Burning Bushes (Wipf and Stock). In American Honey, she embraces the tenets of her faith while lovingly questioning American Evangelical culture’s too-easily packaged definitions of purity, holiness, and mercy. These essays focus keenly on the places in-between those high-minded ideals, the innerworkings of a heart divided, various, both overfull and hungering—the always-contradictory human heart. The narrator of these essays loves being in relationship, values both the spiritual and the physical aspects of being human, and portrays marriage like a good callous forming on her hand as she mulches the landscaping beds: the place “where friction meets tenderness.”

These essays are narratively driven. Some distill life in the flash form, others are patient and segmented, braiding strands of a younger self alive and pulsing on a 150-year-old family farm in Ohio with strands of an older self, which balances motherhood, career, partnership, and a writing life.

In “Natural Habitat,” we read the vivid memory of a family fishing outing from her childhood: “the five of us, all of us, Dad and Mom and me and Bill and Phil, together, rowing in a scary wooden boat around a pond. We got yelled at for almost tipping the boat . . . but the sun glistened on the surface, the cattails danced, frogs jumped into the water, and our hearts leapt with fear and joy. Do you remember the fish? Do you remember the pond?” In the same essay, the adult narrator, with her husband, casts and reels with their three small kids, “untangling fishing wire and re-baiting hooks, catching children before they were whacked in the eye by a mid-cast fishing rod.” In these juxtapositions, the essayist explores the tender work of preserving inherited memories while figuring out how to make her own.

Wells also contrasts the ideal with the authentically and imperfectly lived life. She explores the fiercely held expectations of her twenty-year-old self looking ahead to her well-planned life: “we’d start our huge and happy family, and maybe I’d keep writing while taking our beautiful and compliant children to soccer games and storytime at the library.” Often with humor, she then renders the harried love of exasperating soccer practices and partners’ parallel careers, the family vacation in an idyllic “rustic cabin” (so perfect online) which turns out to be a ten-by-ten shed right off the roaring highway beside a playground in disrepair.

Wells carefully builds with images—like that playground—offering metaphors for the truths and values she holds dear: “I chose the river birch. Its bark peels away in cinnamon-colored strips, like shedding skin, leaving behind a previous identity and embracing a new one.” This image comes early in the essay “Uprooted” in which the narrator, with her husband, chooses “to leave what is familiar for the unknown, to strike out beyond the present in order to make a future” and learns to cherish the groundedness of her childhood and the opportunity to uproot to a town away from family and make something of her own career as a writer and editor.

Throughout, Wells attentively crafts sentences to reflect the intimate rhythms of thinking, living, a body in movement, like this line recounting a study-abroad scene from her college days: “I hula hooped for a lemon Stolychnaya Ruski; it was paradise hot, the bar was open air, everyone sat the picnic tables, clapping, cheering, counting to ten as I hula hula hula won!” Sentences often mimic the mind trying desperately to restrain itself from obsession and from temptation toward an extramarital affair, as well as the genuine frazzle and weariness of an over-scheduled adult life: “I should be sweeping the kitchen floor. I should be reading through the school newsletter so that I know what’s going on with Lydia’s class. I should know something about what’s going on in my kids’ school lives. I shouldn’t be whining . . . stop making such a big deal out of it because it isn’t a big deal, right, right?! Right?!”

The “field guide” nature of the book makes use of the popular how-to approach that turns the concept of a manual on its head and inside out; it undermines the form’s official tone of authority and confidence yielding to uncertainty, to confusion, to unscriptable life. In the opening essay, “Field Guide to Resisting Temptation,” the neat, didactic container allows those taut imperatives to cumulatively reveal the impossibility of getting it right, because, ultimately, getting it right is not the point: “Do not send song lyrics to Facebook or post YouTube music videos or listen to any songs about love gone wrong or one-night stands or anything on country music radio. Okay, no music at all.”

For most Christians, the ultimate field guide to living faithfully is the Bible, and Wells quotes scripture to challenge the Word and to affirm it. In “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” the narrator cites Ecclesiastes, the famous passage often included in Christian wedding ceremonies: “A cord of three stands is not quickly broken.” The narrator admits: “I thought this braid of husband, wife, and God was something firm and unshakeable, but it turned out that its bond is tenuous, capable of loosening quickly, suddenly, a braid whose strands I pull but the hair is too shiny to hold, and the braid unravels. I comb it out and begin again, cross husband over wife, pull God from underneath and wrap around the other two . . . repeat this weave until it holds, for a time.” There is no failsafe guide, these essays assert; there is only the daily choosing.

And Wells seems most interested in that intentional choosing, interested in peeling away societal, religious, and commercial ideals to get down to a more complicated definition of what marriage is for those who choose it with intention: “Our marriage is not just tag-team grocery shopping and babysitting, laundry washed and folded, dinners discussed and cooked and eaten; no, we are creators and dreamers, lovers and friends, ambitious and insecure, weathering the seasons together as best as we can.” Indeed, these essays are invested in love stories that are inclusive and fraught and hard-won: “our love stories are built on the foundation of the ever-afters that preceded us, buttressed by the stories happening around us, and intercepted by the stories developing within us.”

 

American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation by Sarah M. Wells

Resource Publications
 $21.00 Paperback  | Buy Now

 

Jessie van Eerden is the author of three novels, Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses, as well as the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Gulf Coast, and other venues. She teaches creative writing at Hollins University and serves as nonfiction editor for Orison Books.

 

Whose Family Is It: Mine or My In-Laws?

Whose Family Is It: Mine or My In-Laws?

by | May 6, 2022 | Book Reviews

By Carole Mertz

The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continential Memoir by Jill Kandel

Jill Kandel’s memoir opens with a famous piece of advice from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. . .. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

That epigraph, referring to “locked rooms” and to matters of the heart, unsettled and quickened my interest in Kandel’s memoir. With a prologue and epilogue, the book is composed of nine parts in which she chronicles her nearly forty years of marriage, her work, and her and her husband’s residence in four continents, America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

The themes of Kandel’s memoir are twofold. First, as a young married couple, she and Johan, her husband, must adapt not only to each other’s cultures—she is American, he is Dutch—as well as the unfamiliar cultures of people among whom they live and work in very different parts of the world. Second, she must deal with her inability to understand the personality of her father-in-law, Izaak, and the dominance he exerts over his wife and Kandel’s family.

Kandel and Johan meet in North Dakota in 1980. Born in North Dakota, the daughter of a medical doctor and educated as a nurse, she travels abroad to serve a nursing stint in Zambia; Johan, after graduating as an agricultural student in North Dakota, returns to his home in the Netherlands. A romance unfolds; the two meet again in Hardenberg, the Netherlands, where, in 1981, they decide to marry. Johan’s father performs their wedding ceremony in his Dutch Reformed church.

The first decade of the couple’s married life begins in Africa. There, in 1982, Johan works as an agricultural advisor in the village of Kalabo, Zambia, helping local farmers in ­the production of wheat and rice. The couple’s first two children are born and they agree to raise them in this African culture that is still quite new to them, especially to Jill. Since her husband is busy working outside of their home, Kandel acculturates largely on her own. (Another such challenge occurs when some years later they will work with coffee farmers in Indonesia.)

While introducing us to her new Dutch family, Kandel includes occasional glimpses into her family of origin, her former life in North Dakota, and the growing warmth of her relationship with her husband’s sister, Andrea, to whom the book is dedicated. With Andrea’s help, Kandel begins to distinguish traits that are typically Dutch traits from those mannerisms that occurred specifically within her father-in-law’s household.

She starts to comprehend the trauma her in-laws experienced as teenagers in the Netherlands, especially after many disturbing interactions with Izaak. Often, she’s exasperated with him. One occasion occurs while Johan and Jill lived in North Dakota.

Johan is about to defend his PhD dissertation. This comes after years of study and financial strain as their young family grew. With three demanding children, all sharing in the excitement of the day, Kandel who is now seven months’ pregnant with her fourth child decides to iron Johan’s shirt. The family will celebrate the milestone by going out to dinner following Johan’s defense. Izaak, who is visiting, takes a dim view of Jill’s ironing and cries out in his broken English.

“Yill!” he shouts. “There are wrinkles in this shirt. This, it is not ironed proper!”

I stare back at him, completely taken aback. I’m not much of a swearing woman. But by all things holy. I’ve been up half the night with a fussy child. I’m exhausted. I’m growing a baby who will be his grandchild. I’ve cleaned spittle and feces and blood and pus for three years at an understaffed nursing home, and he wants to call me out on my ironing?

I feel his animosity like a slap across my face. I go upstairs shaking with anger and humiliation.

Eventually, Jill learns about Izaak’s adolescence. In 1942, Izaak and Jopie were in love and hoping to marry. But in that year, the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. Food was scarce. Parents hid their young sons for fear they’d be conscripted into the German army. (Unbeknownst to him, Izaak had already lost his oldest brother to the war effort in the Dutch East Indies.)

In the Netherlands, the German occupiers issued identity cards to the Dutch citizens, cards they ironically had to purchase. Kandel writes:

When your identity rests within a piece of paper, controlled at will by an invader, who do you become? You are a photo. You are a fingerprint. You are a number. You exist on a folded card, 4 x 9 inches. Show on demand

Who are you really? What are you becoming? When you pull your card out, and show it to a Nazi soldier, even as you are revealing yourself, you are simultaneously drawing inward, veiling and self-protective.

And when the soldier looks you up and down, nods, agrees that you are you, and hands back your identity card. You take it from him. You put it away.

When was it in this process, that Izaak began to put away more than his card?

When did he begin to put away his personality, his laughter, and the carefree youthfulness that he’d barely even tasted?

Despite her empathy, Kandel suffers frequent instances of Izaak’s rigidity. She questions Johan about it, but he usually replies, “It’s just the way the family functions.” Often these instances embarrass and frustrate Kandel. She views Izaak as living by the clock. To have coffee in the afternoon means it must be served precisely at 4 p.m. and must be accompanied by only two cookies, not more, not less.

Midway through the memoir, Kandel laments having spent all their vacations visiting her in-laws, hers and Johan’s savings spent down each time by these visits. Yet she desires to be the dutiful schoondochte. (The word indicates daughter-in-law, but parsed, literally means clean daughter.) Resentful, she questions if these vacations are worth it, for herself and her children. She continues to be puzzled also by the many regulations the Dutch way of life imposes.

When the healthy Izaak, some years after the death of his wife, opts to end his life by the now-legalized Dutch program of assisted suicide, Kandel is enraged. After he’s gone, she remains tormented by his choice. How dare he stamp this stigma on her family? Her anger and confusion rise to the point that she resolves to publish her research findings and her feelings, going beyond all privacy concerns of the family she married into.

Kandel adeptly wields the back-and-forth issue of time in her memoir. For example, she interrupts her description of what she expresses as her “post-euthanasia syndrome,” in 2012. She describes the Nazis’ war-time occupation of the Kandel family country, their building of the “Atlantic Wall” along the northern seaboard, the construction of the ugly bunkers throughout Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and the downing of the Prince of Orange, a revered Dutch naval ship lost in the Java Sea. (Izaak’s brother went down with that ship.) These events help clarify Izaak’s personality, his early life anxieties, and the horrors he endured. Piecing the events together, Kandel understands Izaak’s need for control, exonerating herself for the anger she had directed toward him. She recognizes he gained comfort as he insisted on daily routines, like the coffee and two cookies precisely at 4 p.m.

I found parts of The Clean Daughter painful to read because of its descriptions of war. It’s a reminder of the horrendous conflict in Ukraine we are witnessing today. But Kandel’s account is deeply rewarding and enlightening. I’ve read many records of World War II, yet her writing delineates psychological tolls of that war I’ve never considered.

In addition, there are interesting character revelations as well as vivid depictions of other challenges in her life. In Part 4, Kandel writes of her family’s residence in the village of Pondok Gajah, Indonesia, in 1989: “There are dozens of fruits I’ve never seen before and can’t name. I walk through market stalls heaped with brown-colored pears covered in lizard-like scaly skin, red fruits with the texture of rubber that sport black, waxy hair spiking out in all directions.”

In Indonesia, Kandel is encouraged by her progress with the language. “After only six weeks, I’d gotten a solid start, more language than I ever acquired in Zambia. I open my heart and arms in the gentle warmth and abundant beauty around me. I feel my life start over, fresh and wild and free.”

Finally, The Clean Daughter shows how a memoir can be successfully organized to drive a reader steadily toward a fully revealed ending. I like to assume the writing of the memoir also brought some peace of mind to the author. Having unlocked some rooms, it will, I hope, have yielded resolution to some unsettled matters within Kandel’s heart.

 

The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continential Memoir by Jill Kandel

North Dakota State University Press
 $32.95  | Buy Now

 

Carole Mertz is the author of the poetry collections Toward a Peeping Sunrise and Color and Line. She also reviews books for U.S., Canadian, and Indian literary journals, among them Arc, Bangalore Review, Taj Mahal Review, and World Literature Today. A semi-retired musician, Carole resides with her husband in Parma, Ohio.