Tag: domestic fiction

When Things Go Missing

Valorie Grace Hallinan11 Comments

“To all families who fall apart and struggle to find their way home again.” – Deborah J. Brasket

What happens when a mother leaves her family?

Shopping list and coupons in hand, fifty-something Fran heads to the grocery store. But instead of shopping, she keeps driving – all the way to the California border, into Mexico, and beyond.

It is 1997. Fran will not be coming home anytime soon.

With deep pleasure, I bring Books Can Save a Life out of retirement to tell you about Deborah J. Brasket’s debut novel, When Things Go Missing. 

But first, let me say that I have been following Deborah’s blog, Writing on the Edge of the Wild, for many years on WordPress. (She now has a Substack version as well.) I have always found her insights about art, literature, truth, beauty, and the human dilemma to be evocative and profound. Truly, her blog has always stood apart from the rest. So it was with great anticipation that I powered up my Kindle and let Deborah’s story carry me away. 

We witness Fran’s confused, angry, and bereft family as they begin to navigate life on their own, on ground that has shifted dramatically. The family Fran leaves behind, like so many families, was already fractured – I would even say traumatized. Where do they go from here, when it feels like the end of life as they’ve known it?

Kay, an aspiring archeologist, receives periodic voice mails from her mother:

“She’s in mourning, she tells herself, mourning a mother she thought she knew who she now realizes she may never have truly known: A mother who always was the still center of comfort she could turn to in times like these, who is there no more. A mother who held her dysfunctional family together, a family she now fears will fall apart. The grief isn’t only about losing her mother but losing everything her mother represented: family, home, security, unconditional love. It’s like her mother’s absence blew a hole through the center of her universe, and everything is flying apart, including Kay. There’s nothing left to hold onto.”

To her son Cal, a heroin addict, Kay mails her mysterious photographs from various South American locations. As the mother of two adult sons, I was haunted by this passage, as I considered what it must have taken for Fran to let go of her son:

“…he gets sideswiped by this opposing flood of thoughts that gushes through his mind like his mother’s conscience. That’s how he sees it too – not his conscience but some uncomfortable and undesirable feeling that drifts in from his mother’s looks and sighs and follows him around like a fucking rain cloud. Hell, if she isn’t still doing it, even now when she’s disappeared.

He clears out a space on the bathroom mirror so he can look at himself, the image blurry in the wetness, surreal, with the steam all around, his face ringed by a bright halo of light. He thinks if he stares at this face ringed with light long enough, hard enough, deep enough, he might catch a glimmer of who the hell he really is or was supposed to be in another lifetime. Whatever it was, he knows it was good. Whatever could have been, whatever he blew away, it was all unbelievably good.”

Walter, Fran’s husband, a taciturn, sometimes volatile, father, gets Fran’s credit card bills: 

“He’s been taking care of Frannie since she graduated from high school and he got home from Vietnam….He never minded that she didn’t work. Why should she: He earned enough on his own…

He’s never tried to stop her before from doing anything she wanted. He just has to keep letting the rope out more, giving her as much lead as she needs, and then, when she’s ready, she’ll find her way home again. It’s what he tells himself, what he needs to believe to get through the day.”

We get a sense of the kind of wife and mother Fran was and is, as Kay, Cal, and Walter at first simply react to Fran’s abandonment. As each of them barely manages to keep going – largely on their own and isolated from one another – they begin to separate from the mother and wife bonds. They begin to individuate. We are witness to a trio of heroic journeys that unfolds in surprising and unexpected directions. 

When Things Go Missing will stay with you long after you’ve read the final page. To me, this is the mark of a powerful and authentic story, one that is so true for America and for our time. You may find yourself reflecting on your own life path, the choices you’ve made, and the choices that await you.  

What are our responsibilities as mothers, parents, and partners? 

Is there such a thing as the perfect mother? 

Are there limits to the bonds of love and family? How do these relationships change over time? Are they meant to be forever?

What are our responsibilities to our own self-actualization? When do we sacrifice our own desires and aspirations for the good of our families and communities?

How do we come to find our chosen families? Can they ever replace our families of origin? Is it possible to achieve a happy blend of the two?

As a longtime reader of Deborah Brasket’s work, I trust her wisdom and relish the grace and richness of her writing. When Things Go Missing is a beautiful unfolding – a tender, loving portrait of a family contending with grief, loss, and regret, while fully embracing all the joy that life can hold. 

I will close with the epigraph that opens When Things Go Missing: 

“I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore, with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” – Jeremiah 31:3

When Things Go Missing, an excellent book club choice, includes discussion questions. Publication date: September, 2025, Sea Stone Press.

When Things Go Missing is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble.

Our Souls at Night

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

Our Souls at Night book cover

“I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.”

“What? How do you mean?”

“I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.”

He stared at her, watching her, curious now, cautious….

….he stood at the door watching her, this medium-sized seventy-year-old woman with white hair walking away under the trees in the patches of light thrown out by the corner street lamp. What in the hell, he said. Now don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

There is no writer quite like Kent Haruf. He’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. I wrote about his other novels, Plainsong (my favorite), Eventide, and Benediction here.

Haruf passed away a year ago, and his final novel, Our Souls at Night, about the blossoming of an older couple’s relationship, was just published.

Like his other novels, Our Souls at Night takes place in the fictitious eastern Colorado town of Holt. I’m not going to say too much about this book because Haruf’s writing doesn’t lend itself to heavy analysis; I think that might ruin it for readers new to this author.

Instead, I’ll refer you to this review by Ursula Le Guin, who greatly admires Haruf’s writing and does a good job of summarizing Haruf’s themes, characters and style.

If you are new to Kent Haruf, you could start with Plainsong. I think you’ll be entranced by the characters in the lonely little desert town of Holt and you’ll want to read the other books.

Our Souls at Night would make a wonderful holiday gift.

“They stopped in one of the towns for hamburgers and then drove up the highway through the Arkansas River canyon, the beautiful fast water, steep red jagged cliffs on each side, there were Rocky Mountain sheep along the road, all ewes with short sharp horns, and went on and then turned off toward North Fork Campground on County Road 240 and entered the national forest…..They could hear it running and rushing. The clear icy water, with brook trout holed up in the hollows below the rocks. There were tall fir trees and big ponderosas and aspen along the creek and back in the hillside.”

The Wonder Garden

Valorie Grace Hallinan7 Comments

The Wonder Garden book cover

“She opens her eyes and looks at the television, a car commercial. An American couple achieves the top of a mountain, commanding a vista. She breathes in and breathes out. It is all right to retreat. She will pull back, she will redraw her boundaries. She will find her balance. When she emerges again, she will be refreshed, reenergized. She will be the best Rosalie she can be. The best and only.”

The Wonder Garden is a collection of exquisite short stories by Lauren Acampora, a new writer whom I’ve added to my “read-everything-by-this-author” list.

I’ve been reading more short stories lately, and I especially like these because they are linked: a protagonist in one story appears as a supporting character in the other stories, so that the collection reads like novel.

The stories are wickedly funny, psychologically complex, dark, uniquely American, and occasionally bleak – but leavened with an understated joy in the ebbs and flows and seasons of life. Living in suburbia and having raised children there, I find them so resonant.

Fictitious Old Cranbury is John Cheever and Mad Men territory, except post 9/11: an upscale Connecticut town on Long Island Sound, the home of a few have-nots but mostly haves. There is a memorial dedicated to five fathers who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and were killed on September 11.

The houses of Old Cranbury form a motif that further links the stories. The restored salt boxes and farmhouses, pretentious mansions, and humbler ranches fitted with granite countertops and fake shutters reflect their inhabitants’ aspirations and obsessions.

Acampora has compassion for her characters, but she can be scathing, too. Rosalie, for example (see above quote) is the type of hyperactive suburban mother who does everything and knows everyone and gives over her life to her five children: she is on the school board, she is prominent in the PTA, she hosts a book club, she makes themed halloween costumes for the entire family, including her brain surgeon husband. She is a good Christian woman who understands she has been greatly blessed and decides to host a poor Bangladeshi foreign exchange student for a semester.

There is a wonderful turning point in the story when the student, Nayana, expresses her sympathy for Noah, Rosalie’s youngest.  Rosalie is puzzled by this, and Nayana explains that Noah had revealed his true history to her: he was adopted into the family, having lost his birth father in 9/11. Noah’s story is sheer fabrication and Rosalie is horrified, having seen to it that her children have lacked for nothing.

Confronting Noah, she is undone by this previously unseen side of her son: it may as well be true, he says, because his neurosurgeon father is never around, implying that Rosalie, too, is lacking as a mother. Concurrent threads in the story reveal that the all-male members of the school board condescend to Rosalie and, most chillingly of all, her husband seems to view her with contempt.

I disliked Rosalie and was highly entertained by her, but at the same I recognized that, though she works hard and means well, she is an aging, marginalized woman in what is still a sexist culture. She is in many respects a throwback to the 1950s, pre-feminist, stay-at-home wives.

Another story is about a young single mother who meets a brain surgeon (yes, Rosalie’s husband) and really believes he will whisk her away to a glamorous life in Paris.

The brain surgeon gets his own story, and we find out he has a few really bizarre secrets of his own.

I loved the aging artist and his wife who transcend themselves to make one last work of art.

Then there’s the newly married advertising executive compelled to leave his job so he can follow his animal spirit.

And the 50-something real estate broker caught in traffic who decides to just stop; she turns off the ignition as cars maneuver around her and spends a long night in the driver’s seat, reviewing her life.

Here is a couple who live as though it’s the 18th century and regularly attend early American reenactments. I recognize this ritual of the children leaving home after a holiday visit:

“The next morning, Cheryl and Roger drive them to the airport. They embrace at the security gate. Both parents resist the itch to remind and advise, to command their son to complete the semester, to tell their daughter to skip Afrikaans. Instead, they let their children pull out of their arms and join the security line. They watch them remove their shoes and put them on the conveyer belt….They watch their children pass through the metal detector’s trellis and, on the other side, give a brief wave and disappear around a corner. They will sit together for the six-hour flight, then part ways in San Francisco, one aimed south, the other east. By the time the sun sets in New England, they will be speeding over freeways their parents have never driven, along the lurid blue coastline at the edge of America….”

In another story, the young adult children of some of the characters we’ve met go to a music festival, including Noah, Rosalie’s son, now a few years older. I love the final image in this passage, where we see Old Cranbury from the perspective of a young person who grew up there:

“Eventually, she will distance herself from the incident, tamp it into a story she tells at parties. She will put herself apart from the man who died. He was fundamentally different, she will rationalize, not from Old Cranbury, unanchored by good parents and constructive surroundings….Far off to the side, before the parking lot, Bethany notices a gathering of people on an open field. This would be the morning yoga session, offered to those able to rise early enough, still interested in breathing. The rows of people move in sync, adopting the same poses, configuring and reconfiguring their limbs like children experimenting with their bodies. Bethany watches as they all bend at once to plant their hands upon the bare field, then arch up in unison, a hundred arms saluting the sun.”

Oh, and, by the way, we haven’t seen the last of Rosalie, who rises like a phoenix in the final story.

Lauren Acampora lives in a suburban town much like the one she depicts. Her husband is an artist, and one of his works is the cover art for The Wonder Garden.

This is one book to add to your holiday wish list, and it’s a great book club choice.

Here is a video that features Lauren Acampora and her husband: