Friday, April 29, 2011
Book Talk: The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran
by Anne Gudger
Anne teaches the Spring Craft class with me,
has thirty years of teaching & writing experience,
and is just a fabulous human!
Families are complicated.
Family is our first introduction to ourselves and others and the intricate dance that follows. Family is the mini-cosmos where, if we’re lucky, we anchor roots and sprout wings but often times the roots are shallow; the wings stay baby down. From wimpy roots and crooked wings sometimes writers are born! Especially memoirists.
The Tender Land is a beautiful memoir by Kathleen Finneran, who creates a tribute to her beloved brother who killed himself when he was fifteen. Her story is about how a family survives such a loss but it is also about the family ties that bind, sometimes too tight and sometimes not tight enough.
There’s a ton to love about this book: the gorgeous use of language, the smoothness of the narrative, the way the story moves forward and backward while holding the reader in the center. Plus Finneran’s use of literary tension. We know the tragedy from the start when the book opens with, “My mother believes she gave birth to an angel . . . . ‘I think there was a reason he was only here for a short time,’ she said. ‘I think he was an angel sent to save someone.’”
Finneran shows her family from kid bikes to snow angels to home movies with humor and love. We see family eccentricities as babies join the large Catholic clan during the 60’s and 70’s in middle suburbia. By seeing Finneran’s family, we of course see our own. Finneran masters the truth that by being specific, you touch on the universal: love, mystery, faith, guilt, regret and loss. She renders ordinary family moments into poetry. One evening young Kathleen and her mom--who’s pregnant with another child--talk before the kids all go to a movie with their dad:
“What movie are you going to see” she asked when she finished coloring her lips.
“Kiss me now,” I said.
“Who’s in that?”
“No. Kiss me now, before you blot your lips.”
I was sitting on the side of the tub, and she bent toward me to kiss my cheek.
“No. On my knee,” I said, “so I can see it.”
“How about your hand?” she suggested, taking it in hers and kissing it. “I can’t bend down that far anymore.”
“My hand and my knee,” I said. I stood up and lifted my leg to the sink, and she pressed her lips against the middle of my knee, exaggerating the sound and time a simple kiss required.
In another passage, Finneran writes,
There was the time before he was born and the time after. Ordinary time. A time when we woke up every day, our souls still within us. And now there was this time. The time being. A time for which my father said he was sorry, one for which we were all too young. It would be a time—this time—unlike any that had passed before. A long time. A time presided over by angels perhaps, messengers in slow motion.
Our hearts break with Finneran as she wrestles with the death of her brother. Like families, grief is complicated. Finneran openly writes about how broken she is. More than ten years after her brother’s death she’s traveling by train and a young boy is collecting signatures from all the passengers. She signs her name “Sean,” rather than Kathleen without thinking about how she’s not Sean, how they are separate.
Finneran writes the final chapter as her adult self writing to her dead brother, telling him some of what he’s missed and struggling to make sense of her loss and her grief. She concludes with:
Sean, time passes, it’s true. Hours, days, and decades. And grief goes by its own measure. Now, before this day of angels ends again, before the sky changes color and the moon follows in its phase from full to new, I want to call out your name and tell you, across the tender land, that we have gone on living. We are all, every one of us, alive.
It must be said, for me, that this book falls short in the category of total honesty.
Wait.
Didn’t I already say Finneran is open and lets us see in? Isn’t that being honest? Yes and no. On many levels she is so honest, so open, so vulnerable. But where I have trouble with her book is around Sean’s death. I think there’s a family secret, an elephant in the living room that Finneran tiptoes around.
Having studied with Jennifer for a few years now, she’s in my head as I write and read. One of her lessons is that you have to address your neurosis on the page or the reader will do it for you. If you don’t say, “yeah, this was messed up.” . . . but you try to dress up the ugly with glitter and clear-coat, the reader will question how reliable you are as a narrator, how honest. So, here with The Tender Land, I’m left wondering about Sean and their family. Yes, Finneran touches on her own depression and her mom’s too but it’s in hindsight. The family we meet while Sean is alive is loving and caring and close. We’re not privy to Sean’s likely depression or how growing up with a depressed parent effected the family. There’s more to Sean’s suicide than Finneran cops to.
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