
Review: Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss by Anne Panning
Reviewed by Jill Moyer Sunday
Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss
A memoir by Anne Panning
Stillhouse Press, September 2018
$16.00, 258 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0996981699
Anne Panning’s latest book plumbs the complicated nature of family dynamics through the lens of her mother’s untimely death. Although the book jacket copy describes Dragonfly Notes as Panning’s first full-length memoir, it is built on a series of episodic essays, some as short as a half-page. The book moves easily between Panning’s childhood, her adult life, and her mother’s life, smoothly mixing past and present tenses. The title comes from the author’s fixation on dragonflies as her dead mother’s talisman, the book beginning with this sentence: “My mother appears regularly to me in the form of a dragonfly—or so I like to think.” With those words, just enough mysticism is injected into the narrative for the reader to question the nature of physical separation, whether by death or distance.
As good memoirs should, Dragonfly Notes offers the reader much more than a single focus. While Panning’s book is prompted by her mother’s death, her narrative winds through the effects of her father’s alcoholism on the family, pointedly describing the diminished life her mother lived because he drank. In “Post-It Apologies,” Panning records contrite love notes written by her father, this one uncovering another of multiple addictions that ensnared him: “Did you know I think you get more beautiful each day? You know I lost some money yesterday, but next time it’s gonna be big! Just wait!” “Big” never happened, and although Panning’s writing makes tangible the stress placed on her mother’s shoulders to feed and clothe four children with the money made from cleaning houses, she laments a different kind of deficit: “He withdrew from us like a rabbit burrows into its hole—as if the idea of us and our desperate needy hearts posed a danger to him, as if we might eat him alive—when all we really wanted was his presence.”
The subtitle leads us to the hard center of Dragonfly Notes. Panning covers the loss (On Distance and Loss) well by letting us feel her confusion as she confronts the void left by her mother: “The first time I returned to my parents’ house after my mother’s death, I wandered from room to room, unable to bear the sight of her belongings. In the bathroom, a tube of her Maybelline lipstick still sat on the shelf. I opened it and put some on, feeling the shape of her mouth against mine.”
But it is the other part of the subtitle, the Distance part, that elevates this memoir above a lovely, but common, grief narrative. In the throes of mourning, Panning realizes that she’s held her family at arm’s length for the entirety of her adult life. Leaving home at 17 for a drama camp, the author never returned to live in Minnesota. While her mother’s health declined after complications from a prolapsed bladder repair, Panning and her own little family were in Vietnam on sabbatical. Though separated from her mother by such a great physical distance, the author craved emotional closeness, spending hours at the fabric market collecting material for her mother’s quilt making. It is Panning’s awareness in this moment that shapes the rocky interior of this book: “Eventually, I had an epiphany: If I wanted to be in such close contact with my family, then surely I wouldn’t have moved to someplace as far away as Vietnam (or the Philippines or Hawaii or New York or Ohio or Idaho or China). Right?”
Panning began writing out of grief, but she leads her readers to an even darker place, ironically similar to the “rabbit hole” her father sought. Her upcoming memoir, Bootleg Barber Shop: A Daughter’s Story, promises to shine a light down that hole.
Jill Moyer Sunday is a former journalist who teaches writing and literature at Waynesburg University. Her creative nonfiction can be found in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Connotation Press, JAEPL, The New Delta Review, and WOE.
I met Anne in Vietnam. Her regular visits to the fabric market take on new meaning now. Reading this makes me question my reason for being there. Such a brilliant, insightful, author.
This review makes me want to run out and buy this book!