Starred review from January 4, 2021
This imaginative and precise collection shows Beard (The Boys of My Youth) at her best. The nine entries vary in scope and subject, but loss and melancholy bridge the collection. “Last Night” captures her final moments with her beloved, terminally ill dog, and “Maybe It Happened” reflects on the unreliability of human memory. The title essay interweaves Beard being left by her partner and her grief after the death of a friend: “In less than five minutes, we don’t have her anymore. She’s gone.” Beard can evoke many emotions in a single stroke: “The Lab lived to be fifteen too. The marriage, fourteen,” she writes of losing both a dog and a relationship. She’s also cunning with surprising metaphors and details, as in “Close,” where she compares writing to sitting on a sled: writing a book is like “the snow has melted and there’s just grass and gravel. It takes a lot to get the sled moving, and then it goes only a few inches.” These sharp essays cement Beard’s reputation as a master of the form. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.
February 15, 2021
Beard returns to creative nonfiction. "Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn't stop." This is the opening line of the first piece, and it may take readers a few moments to realize that "she" is a dog. This sense of disorientation serves the piece well. Brief and heartbreaking, "Last Night" details the decision to euthanize a beloved pet, and anyone who has struggled with this choice knows that uncertainty is part of what makes it so difficult. One might assume that this vignette is personal, but the piece works without a biographical hook. The question of genre is significantly more complicated in "Werner," the story of a man who escapes a tenement fire by diving from his apartment through a window in the building next door. The protagonist, Werner Hoeflich, is an actual person, and the author fleshed out what she learned from him with details of her own creation. The result is both gripping and meditative. Beard's ambiguous approach is more disturbing in "Cheri," which recounts the last days of a woman with terminal cancer who died with the assistance of Jack Kevorkian. This story was also based on interviews, this time with the protagonist's daughter, but Beard has said that much of her piece is pure invention. In a 2011 Bookforum article, Beard said, "If I called it fiction, pretended Cheri Tremble was a figment of my imagination, it wouldn't be interesting to readers, and if I treated it as journalism and wrote just facts, it might have been mildly interesting to readers but not at all interesting to me as the writer." Readers can make of that what they will, but the resulting piece lacks the immediacy of "Werner," and it's possible that trying to honor fact while indulging in fiction is part of what makes this piece feel ungainly. The rest of the essays vary in style, substance, and quality. A rangy collection, sometimes insightful, uneven, and occasionally unsettling.
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March 15, 2021
Beard is an exacting writer, and her books endure. Her first essay collection was The Boys of My Youth (1998), followed by the novel, In Zanesville (2011), and she returns with a collection of seven head-spinning essays and two galvanizing stories. Beard writes about pain, cancer, death, divorce, violence, and bizarre alignments, subjects one may prefer to avoid, but Beard's cascades of breathtaking detail are irresistible as she evokes the tangible world, the inner realm, and life's welter of the unexpected and the inevitable. "Werner" recounts the hard-to-believe experience of a man who leapt from his burning apartment building. "Cheri" chronicles a woman dying of cancer who finds her way to Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The title essay recounts indelible, beautiful, absurd, and sorrowful experiences from Beard's life, including a trip to India and a detonated marriage. There is extraordinary energy and force in Beard's refined, penetrating, darkly rhapsodic prose as she writes of family, dogs, love, friendship, chaos, and danger in zigzagging associations, spiraling juxtapositions, and sudden switchbacks, seeking to "make art out of life"" and succeeding brilliantly and profoundly.
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