This is an unflinching and extremely affecting look into the deep depths of grief. Bidwell Smith lost both her parents to cancer before she reached 30, this book charts her journey through the bleak and jagged journey of mourning. It takes in her failed relationships with men and drink, her faltering career and her all-consuming depression.
And it’s every bit as bleak as it sounds.
Smith writes as though she is underwater; her tone is languid, drugged. She writes almost like she is blurting stuff out into a diary. The time frame ebbs and flows; one moment she is a lost girl shoplifting in order to make friends, then she is hoisted up on a bed in an abortion clinic desperately imploring her dead mother to reappear and save her.
Youth and innocence are mixed over and over again with the pain of adulthood, reality and regret.
This is a book written in beats, lines are short and sometimes disjointed. Smith repeatedly describes silences as “a beat passes” and her palpitating heartbeat during panic attacks as “pound, pound, skip“. I found these devices so effective, you felt that any moment, at any beat, everything could change.
And everything can change, at any moment.
I lost a parent at a youngish age (23) and could somewhat relate to Smith’s experience. However, my father died suddenly, her parents died after long agonising illnesses. I have always harboured a strange, dark envy for people who got to say goodbye to loved ones, jealous of those moments in which to pour every joy and regret. I didn’t get that chance, I am one of those who know what “everything changed” feels like. But having read this book, where death hovers unrelentingly over everything, for what seems like eternity, I have changed my mind. I don’t think I could have coped with the unremitting anguish that Smith had to endure for so long at such an age.
One of the things that has struck me since reading this are the handful of reviews on Goodreads berating Smith for being “spoilt” and “whiney” and whose “terrible decisions” were a result of her inability to just get over herself (all accusations of this nature don’t flinch from pointing out her sex as if this somehow made her depression some frivolous, girly, middle-class self-indulgence, and were sadly nearly all made by other women). Largely the reviews for this book are triumphant, but those handful of spiteful individuals have made my blood boil.
To read such a book as this, such a bare and open examination of loss, and react to it with scoffy, eye-rolling sarcasm is to totally and utterly miss the point. I can only imagine people who respond this way have themselves rather indulgent and frivolous lives.
Ok, I will admit to ONE moment where I too cringed a little; Smith is on a train when someone commits suicide on the line, her reaction to this seems fleeting after pages dedicated to her own losses. In fact, she seems to only respond to this death in terms of what it means to her own situation. This scene did momentarily alienate me, I was hoping for some thoughts on the victim, their family, but she appears only to take a moment to turn her head and look at the bloody smear on the train.
But this is ONE incident in a book that is otherwise deeply rooted in the human experience, not just Smith’s and one that I can see myself pouring a lot of thought into to try to understand. Nobody ever talks about death, and when someone opens themselves up to relate how bile-churningly dismal it can be, this should be celebrated, not fobbed off. Death is something that happens to all of us and we should all learn to embrace it, guts, selfishness and all.
But, there is a chink or light to be found in this book.
Smith points out towards the end, that the ability to grieve is a soulful skill that goes hand in hand with love, breathing life into the old platitude that “grief is the price we pay for love”. This book is divided into sections, each taking its title from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief and in each section Smith reflects on Life as well as Death in these terms. Don’t come away thinking this is a book just about death, it’s about so much more than that. I haven’t rooted for someone so much in a book for a long time and it was with utter delight that you discover she has found happiness at the end.
Yes this book can be bleak and brutal, but it’s also brilliant and beautiful.
It’s now more like four hours since I finished it and I am convinced this is a book that will be staying with me for a while yet.
Book info:
- ISBN: 978472214294
- Published by Headline, 2013
- Sent copy of book by publisher through Bookbridgr