Bough Down by Karen Green
My rating: 5/5 cats
anniversary float, for reasons.
i was afraid to read this book. i was afraid it was going to knock something loose in me, emotionally, and that it would be the book to cut the “i-don’t-cry-at-books-karen” to her knees.
this is a book written by dfw’s widow, after his suicide, and is a collection of free-verse musings about the end of their lives together, and the period following his death, interspersed with her artwork.
and quickly, so as not to dwell or invite sympathy: i have been there. i have found a body. i have spent nineteen years wondering what i could have done differently, how i could have been better, given more, how i could have interpreted the signs better, to have been the kind of person who doesn’t have this memory following them.
i bought the book yesterday, and i knew if i didn’t read it right away, it would be just one more book in the stacks, sandwiched between cookbooks and frothy YA dystopias and it would stare at me, accusingly, every day, as one more reminder of my failure of character, of my reprehensible fear-stasis, and it would lose all potential impact from having become a just another familiar prop in my house. so i sucked it up, and read it all alone in my house on a rainy friday evening, during the worst of all possible weekends. and it hit me again and again, but it did not make me cry. so there’s that.
i was not prepared for the loveliness of it. for how much it would be a better-expressed manifestation of my own voiceless rage, despair, self-recrimination, and nostalgia. theirs was a different relationship than the one i lost, but it’s got the same infrastructure, and nearly the same emotional aftermath.
there are so many passages i wanted to type out here, but it almost feels too revealing, too personal, to do so, if that makes any sense. and it’s the kind of work that is difficult to excise a portion of to hold up to the light – it works better as a progression, even though it doesn’t read chronologically. but there is a raw emotional-logic to its narrative.
and it plays rough. it is like being exposed to all the stages of grieving at once, and while there are glimpses of humor, it seems inappropriate to respond to the humor, pressed up against the wall of so much confusion and despair as it is. every single time she mentioned the dogs, my heart ached.
the news of dfw‘s death floored me. i remember the phone conversation that broke the news to me. i just whispered “no,” and thought “not again,” like it was a mistake, or a prank. and i didn’t even know the man. a couple of exchanged letters, a single late-night phone conversation, some broken plans; but it still felt like a betrayal. infinite jest, from the first time i read it, was and is one of the most impressive books i have ever read, and i felt that anyone who could have written something like that must surely have been above the kinds of self-doubt and disappointments as the rest of us, with our comparatively shabby intellects.
but obviously not. and this book adds a dimension to the man and his legacy that was lacking in many of the self-serving memorial-speeches and articles that came out after his death. and she sort of addresses this, with such casually-sharp insight. this is a genuine love letter; a true expression of grief and the fucking howling anguish that follows you around like some kind of horrible shadow forever.
but it is never manipulative or pity/attention-seeking. (except that on the copyright page, there is an offer to obtain “a special signed and numbered edition” of the book, which seems inappropriate and a little ghoulish)
but apart from that, it is a jewel of a book, and while i still abhor the act that gave this book life, it does help, in some small way, to understand.
