Paired Book Review by Juliet Patterson & Kristine Langley Mahler
by Juliet Patterson
Milkweed Editions
September 2022
ISBN: 978-1571311764
by Kristine Langley Mahler
University of West Virginia Press
October 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952271-65
The Sinkhole of Curing Season: A Collaborative Fall to Pieces by Juliet Patterson and Kristine Langley Mahler
We met (as many writers do) on Twitter (before the platform spiraled out of control) in a shared admiration of our debut nonfiction projects. In reading each other’s books (as writers, but also virtual strangers) we both experienced a strong recognition of shared emotions, disparate though the subject matter may have originally seemed. Interested in this conjunction, we approached our review through interweaving excerpts from Sinkhole (in black) and Curing Season (in blue) to illustrate the mutual threads of longing and loss found in both books. We chose our excerpts chronologically and without consultation. We were surprised by the way so many lines cohered, the way so many ideas stretched into one.
We offer two collaged excerpts below that were created from the mix of these lines. These excerpts, framed by conversation and commentary, offer a glimpse of the shared recognition in our work, a way to reimagine a book review’s form, and a way to remember the expansive possibilities that can be found inside personal narrative. But first, a brief summary and review of each book:
Kristine: Juliet Patterson accomplishes a nearly impossible task in Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide as she reconstructs the devastating history which nearly eroded her family—the suicides of both of Patterson’s grandfathers as well as her father—by writing into the silences which muzzled and masked her family’s history of depression. A riveting exploration of loss fastened to the slippery truth of artifacts which gesture toward certainty but leave more questions than concrete answers, Sinkhole reveals the instability of bedrock and the tenuous threads of connection to both place and family which keep us suspended above the abyss. Patterson’s willingness to dig into the environmental and social devastation undergirding her family’s history has shored up the walls from caving in, showing that further damage can be stopped if it can be understood.
Juliet: A beautiful, experimental memoir of displacement and loneliness, Curing Season is an investigation and meditation on four years of the author’s life, four years that have had enormous impact in Mahler’s psyche. In thirteen essays—each of which invite a new structure and form—Mahler spins around Pitt County, the location of her childhood home in suburban North Carolina—exhuming its history, ecology and cultural proclivities as a way of understanding self. Pitt County, as both a spectral and geographical site, provides a platform for Mahler to expose her obsessions, questions and uncertainties that surround her. Personal photographs and artifacts collaged with Pitt County history near the end of the book offer a prism-like view into Mahler’s yearning—still—to belong to a place she can’t forget.
Juliet: Below are the first string of lines that highlight an obsession the books have with history–familial, political and ecological–and with the history of archives and artifacts. What’s inherited or learned? And how does familial story intersect or collapse into the larger fabric of history? How does this come to bear on the idea of self? Or grief? Or loss? There’s a lyric interrogation in these lines that’s centered on these questions and in the gaps and silence–both written and told–one finds there:
I knew these histories were littered with omissions. … I read with skepticism, with an eye toward the heated rhetoric of that era: of whiteness, national pride, and tradition.
The tobacco fields that have turned into an extension of the subdivision will be representative of the town building atop its history. I will not use these houses as emblems of progress, because progress means growth
and too many things have remained the same.
Outside of town, a cross burned in a baseball field where Klan members met for rallies and barbecues.
I kept archives. I had digital archives, bookmarked websites I moved from computer to computer over the years and I also had physical archives, talismanic objects I retained through my moves as proof to myself
that those events have really happened.
These portraits seemed to create a world, an indestructible record of the past.
I have returned a hundred times; I have never come home.
Kristine: It’s startling and crushing to see how our books both grapple with the presentation of carefully eroded histories–a display we discover was meant to represent a sort of natural weathering when, actually, the facts had been deliberately excised and polished over. Loss is a shared stream in our work, but Sinkhole and Curing Season intentionally shore up the creek banks with evidence and artifacts, putting the process of reconstruction on the page to prevent any further destruction.
Juliet: I’m interested in the way we’re both thinking about the trajectory and suspicion of progress in these lines. It’s a recurring theme in each book, though not an overt subject. And yet, each of us seems to be trying to discover ourselves through the roots of a specific geographical location. Sinkhole centers on a small town in Kansas; Curing Season considers Pitt County, North Carolina. And yet, these lines make it clear that these are really stories about the twentieth century, about the making of that history and of the hollowing out of rural America.
Juliet: Here’s another set of lines that expand on these same ideas, but with a clearer focus on the ancestral self:
It’s as if I am trying to remember myself, I told one friend—as if I am making a new place for myself.
Belonging to a place is not the same as belonging to the place. Recording a history is not the same as
recording the history.
This place was a part of me—a place I could possess and one that possessed me.
I didn’t even remember that the house was on Pocosin Road. I had pulled up Google Maps and I followed roads out of town, tracing lines in my memory, looking for the right area. No, that’s not true.
I had spent so much time considering what had been taken from me, but for the first time, I felt that its lasting effects might be a deeper trust in all that I had been given.
I have grown to love land I never lived in, including all the homes my ancestors claimed for me, the places they toiled and disintegrated into, the land where my great-greats built their homes and stayed.
Kristine: Our books are firmly entrenched in exploring our place-based legacies–those created for us as well as those we hoped to create for ourselves–in order to discover what homes we might be carrying into the future. Sinkhole revisits the ancestral landscape of Juliet’s family, both physically and mentally; Curing Season revisits a physical landscape defined by my lack of an ancestral connection and considers the mental toll. Both books have a curious need to consider the authority of memory while also claiming the right to redefine histories with new information, an acknowledgment that the meanings of ancestry and home are not static.
Juliet: I’d like to think that each of these books (while described as memoir) push the limits and foundation of that form, as well as notions of “truth.”
Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022) and two full-length poetry collections, Threnody, (Nightboat Books 2016), a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Poetry Award, and The Truant Lover, (Nightboat Books, 2006), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award.
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022) and A Calendar is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, named Notable in Best American Essays 2019 and 2021, and published in Fourth Genre, American Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, and Brevity, among others. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.
5 April 2023
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