If you like intelligent, disturbing literary thrillers that challenge your beliefs about violence and its perpetrators, this book’s for you.
Two young teenaged girls have turned up dead in the past year in a small Missouri town. A Chicago reporter, who grew up there, is sent to cover the story. She has recently emerged from a stay in a psych ward and is struggling to refrain from her habit of carving words into her own skin.
Trauma
At 66, when I look back over my early life, I see the typical manifestations of trauma. I began to “forget” the abuse— dissociate---well before the age of 5. I experienced a first depression at 12. By 14 I had developed an eating disorder, alternating periods of anorexia and bingeing. At 17, I considered suicide. In college, I would walk for hours to calm anxiety attacks that seemed to come from nowhere. In my early 20s, I fell in love with an alcoholic, a relationship that ended after two and a half exhausting years of anger and mistrust.
Powers is in a league all his own when it comes to writing about the environment and impending climate catastrophe. He speaks with crystalline emotional and moral clarity about the natural world crashing down around us; we should be terrified, he says, and we must confront the political and economic powers invested in keeping us blithely indifferent.
Like everyone, I'm exhausted. Minnesota has one of the highest covid transmission rates in the country and has held that position for weeks. I've been afraid to do much of anything outside our home, other than the usual and necessary errands.
It's becoming apparent that this way of living is not sustainable. I feel depression creeping up. So F. and I are going out for breakfast tomorrow, early, to escape the crowds. I hate to take the risk of getting or transmitting covid, mostly because our doctors and nurses are desperate for relief. But depression can be just as dangerous as covid--it makes me push away those I love most.
I'm trying to cling to the news that is most hopeful: the omicron virus is less deadly, the Pfizer antiviral pill is 90 percent effective early in the disease. I need that hope. For the first time I see why Jesus listed it among the top three: faith, hope, and love.
As a survivor of childhood abuse, I've noticed a pattern: I feel my worst just before a memory or insight that propels intense growth. I hope the pandemic is like that. I hope it precedes a world-wide reckoning, a humbling here in the U.S., where our sense of control and entitlement has been blown to smithereens--then ushers in a new era of intense growth and innovation.
I hope.
