Engine Books is offering a discount on bulk orders of Other Heartbreaks for reading groups / book clubs. In addition, Patricia Henley would be happy to SKYPE with book clubs who read the book and want her to talk about it. In fact, if there are groups in our local area, she would be happy to attend.
Please feel free to contact Patricia Henley via facebook,
and THANKS for spreading the word!
"Sandra's love for Kelly is not the sort you hear about in songs on the jukebox. It's not desperate or crazy. They met three years ago and it was one year before they made love. Kelly said he wanted to get to know her first and Sandra thought that was a novel idea. When she remembers that year going by, she imagines ranging in the high country on a long hike, when it's tough-going at first and you don't know what to expect. Maybe you slip and fall when the trail crosses a creek bed, maybe the first lake is small, disappointing, but you push yourself, you glory in the little things along the way, the shooting stars and glacier lilies, the marmot whistling, and before long, just as you are simply traveling, putting one boot in front of the other, for the bliss of it, you come upon grand peaks and a string of alpine lakes so rare and peaceful that you imagine no one else has ever been there before you. It's where you belong. That's what being with Kelly is like. Easy, once you reach cruising altitude. Paradise, kind of. And ordinary. Common pleasures renew them. Razzing one another; watching a video in their bathrobes; dividing a foxglove in the fall; lying awake in one another's arms at midnight, waiting for Desiree [Sandra's teenage daughter] to come in from some breakneck double date. Love you can't imagine when you're young, when you think that love is you winning him over, a treadmill of pursuit and chicanery." by Patricia Henley
The above quote is one of my all - time favorites, from a short story that I read twenty years ago and never forgot. These characters, Sandra and Kelly and Desiree, do not appear in Henley's upcoming collection, Other Heartbreaks; yet I felt compelled to mention them here because the women in these latest stories -- June, Jenny, Meg, Ellen, Bonnie, Barbara, Emma, Sophie -- are heartbreak survivors. If they re-discover love, it will not be about pursuit and chicanery. It will be a love they could not have imagined when young. In the opening story, Henley writes, "Some forks in the road no one knows about but the two people involved" (20). Other Heartbreaks is a book about those forks, those divergent paths.
A few months ago I had the good fortune to meet Patricia Henley, virtually on facebook and actually out on the sidewalk, since, as it so happens, we live only a few blocks apart. Whenever I read a book of short stories, I always wonder if the various characters know each other. Is the book of stories a little world, a little community, where the inhabitants wander from page to page? Do they encounter each other while out walking or biking, or stopping by the post office? I like to think they do!
In this collection, I particularly relished the local color in a few of the stories: the Wabash River, Tippecanoe County, Battle Ground, Brookston, Delphi. I was transported by the mention of vintage perfumes, Tabu and White Shoulders. I chortled over the absurdly symbolic professions assigned to a couple of lesser characters: the emotionally distant "attorney specializing in outer space law" and the "professor who had devoted herself to her scholarly career -- she studied companion animal behavior -- until she found herself still alone . . . " (13, 69). And then there's Ellen's dream job: "Something temporary that would not require new clothes or even an attitude adjustment" (67).
If I had to pick a favorite, it would be the first story in the book, "Rocky Gap," about four adult siblings, June, Jimmy, Anne, and Peggy. The occasion is the first family gathering since the death of Peggy, the youngest sister. Henley's description of their childhood reminded me of growing up with my own five siblings: "They got into plenty of trouble. [Well, we didn't really, not all that much.] Setting field fires. [In fact, this did happen to my little brother -- an accident!] Grinning innocently. They were innocent. Six miles from town, with only network TV" (23). Yes, that was us!
And so was this: "They survived their parents' excess, their imprudence, their disorganization, their inability to harness their darkest energy. That generation, they didn't know much more about psychology than people who lived during the Civil War" (20).
Just the other day, my twin brother and I were discussing the eerie reality that one day, one of us six kids will be the last one standing; one of us will bury the preceding five. Then I opened Henley's book to find one of those well - timed reading coincidences that seem so often to grace our lives. As the family gathering and the story itself draw to a close, June and her partner Tanya discuss Peggy's passing:
"Don't take it wrong. What she said helped."
"What'd she say?"
"She said, 'Someone in your family has to die first.'"
Someone may beg to be released from pain with morphine.
Someone may suffer head injuries in a car crash.
Some fortunate one might keel over in a vegetable garden from heatstroke. . . .
The last sib will have to watch it, and scatter ashes. Or ride in a car behind the hearse, to and fro. (23 - 24)
Yes, that will be us . . .
Other Heartbreaks is due out in mid - October. So as the seasons are changing, why not pick up a copy on one of those "Sunday afternoons, in the bittersweet hours from three to seven," curl up in a sunny window seat, and lose -- or find -- yourself in the community of these heart-broken souls. Share their quest for local peace and tenderness and love you can't imagine.
More Favorite Passages
16: "They toss little scraps of origami wishes into the fire. June thinks she should wish for World Peace, but she doesn't. She wishes for Local Peace."
69: "On Sunday afternoons, in the bittersweet hours from three to seven, they held an open house for friends and students and neighbors."
81: " 'We've been building a bridge, right? . . . I thought -- when I saw you -- that the last little bit of the bridge would click into place. . . . But there's still a gap.' "
101: "Her house was like a Carl Larsson watercolor, homey, cheerful, some earthy potpourri simmering atop the woodstove, the colors of her second-hand linens and furniture Swedish-pastel, chosen to ward off the chill of the long winters."
148: " . . . it's a fallacy to think that a mother can travel alone. If you have children, you're never quite whole again. There's a reason why they're called your flesh and blood . . . "
Engine Books is offering a discount on bulk orders of Other Heartbreaks for reading groups / book clubs. In addition, Patricia Henley would be happy to SKYPE with book clubs who read the book and want her to talk about it. In fact, if there are groups in our local area, she would be happy to attend.
Please feel free to contact Patricia Henley via facebook,
and THANKS for spreading the word!
Tabu! I can still smell my mother's perfume as they dressed to go out. I really can.
ReplyDeleteThe deaths of siblings: I dreaded it as a child. I feared that one of them would die before me and I'd have to go on. Now, with Tom being such a smoker, and my own health stuff, I still am counting on the fact that it will be me first. It has to be!
If I'd had children of my own, as they all do, it might be different. But they remain my closest, nearest and dearest. Their lives and their childrens's lives—it's unthinkable to outlive any one of them. And if I do, it's a crime, as I'm the oldest, and it should be me.
Only time will tell, though, so I guess it's silly to think about. But as you say, when you come across something in a book—one can't help but think.