In need of a friend

A bright, talented, loving child lives grows up with a paranoid father who falls for conspiracy theories about politics, The parents neglect him, argue, scream and physically fight. Estranged from the father, the son leaves the miserable family to attend college and find success in an advertising career while struggling with the various extreme identities experienced with family, co-workers and friends. 

Identifying as they and trans in Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom, the protagonist yearns for love and understanding. But the family’s and country’s politics are in upheaval. People are angry and unhappy, and life can quickly move from one extreme to another. The character relies on drugs and alcohol, loses the job and endures a head injury after a violent breakup with a lover. The mother calls to report the father is missing, and they heads off for Arkansas in a stolen BMW with a new young friend in tow. 

The road trip is funny and wild as the odd couple philosophize, argue, drink and meet an assortment of characters on the road in the effort to find out what happened to the father. 

Carlstrom tells the story of two of the many individuals in this world who navigate life without real family support or guidance. They have little choice but to go through life relying on scraps of kindness of others who could otherwise walk away. 

In the end, the protagonist confides their love for Yivi like a little sister. “You might not realize this, but you single-handedly got me through the worst weeks of my life. If you ever need anything, I don’t care what it is, I’m here…. And if I never hear from you again after tomorrow, that’s okay. I’ll still be happy knowing that somewhere out there I have a psychic, communist, knife-wielding, drug-dealing, and huge-hearted garbage-goth friend named Yivi.” 

Good people are out there but for far too many, they are hard to find.

Family memories

We manipulate our memories and they also manipulate our behavior far into the future. Things Don’t Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins is about a wealthy, dysfunctional family with a controlling and abusive father. The youngest daughter rebels against the control, refusing to be complacent like her mother and sister. She sees problems and speaks out in ways that challenge family dynamics.

At age 13, Laika abruptly vanishes on the way to school the day after a difficult birthday party for the mother. The older sister, Willa, while remaining compliant with her father’s wishes, continues the search and cannot forget the bond she had with Laika.

Twenty-five years later, Willa and her husband attend a dinner party hosted by a former lover and her wife, joined by a brother and a memory expert, another brother and a woman from France. Liv, the memory researcher, points out that any group is likely to have “wildly differing memories of a single event, when you’d be right in thinking that everyone experienced the exact same thing.”

Willa’s husband is close to her abusive father and joins the man in suggesting that the sister died years earlier. Willa cannot dismiss the concerns, and asks about factors that influence memory of events and Liv points to good health and sleep as well as “state of mind, wish fulfillment, stress. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt.”

Liv also explains how entire communities and consumers will shade certain memories, collectively attempting to forget and put certain difficult people behind. One character notes, “given we’re constantly bombarded with information, much of which comes with a certain agenda attached. We need to know the extent to which our memories are reliable, and, equally, the extent to which memory itself can be deliberately constructed.

The conversation triggers outbursts from two guests and helps Willa discover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance and the father’s role as he attempted to mask evidence of ugly control and abuse.

Families grow together, heal together, form memories together. Family members can break a cycle of lies, control and abuse by reckoning with the truth. Only then can painful memories be set aside, allowing forgiveness and love to thrive once again.

Interruptions

The tale is a familiar one...

Shares of  a small Canadian metals company skyrocket by 250 percent after the US government agrees to support the company's exploration efforts with a road in remote northwest Alaska.   

"The White House on Monday announced a partnership with Trilogy Metals as part of a push to unlock domestic supplies of copper and other critical minerals in the Ambler mining district in Alaska," reports CNBC. "Opponents of the long-debated Ambler Road project, a 211-mile industrial road through the Alaskan wilderness, have said it will harm landscapes that support local communities and wildlife."

The news story recalls the mystery novel Interruptions, set in Sitka and first published more than two decades ago, later released as an e-book in 2009.  

Two teenaged boys enjoy exploring the wilderness near their homes in Sitka, Alaska, and that includes following a mining engineer who is consulting on an unpopular road project. Gavin convinces his best friend to skip school and follow the engineer, intent on gathering evidence to to stop construction of the road crossing Baranof Island.  

The boys steal the engineer's backpack and trouble soon follows. One child is murdered. The other boy's mother, a leading opponent of the road, abruptly goes missing. Mother and son have no choice but to work separately to find the killer and expose secrets behind an unnecessary road that would forever change the character of an Alaskan community.

Back to the news: "The Ambler Road Project is a proposal for a 211-mile industrial access road and is intended to facilitate the development of at least four large-scale mines and potentially hundreds of smaller mines across the region," reports an opposition website. "It would cross 11 major river systems...."

The two proposed roads, one from a mystery novel and the other from the news, are more than a thousand miles apart and yet both have ties to mining exploration and Alaska Native corporations. 

When Interruptions was first published, Sitka was Alaska's fifth largest city with a population of 8,800. Its rank has since fallen to twelfth with about 8,200 people. On the other hand, Wiseman, near the Ambler road project, has about 24 people. 

End justifies the means?

 

In This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead, Jane Sharp, a senior in college, is at a loss after her middle-aged father stops taking his blood pressure medication and effectively kills himself with a heart attack. Soon afterward, she watches a news story about a women’s body found in a Florida lake and a detective imploring the public for their help. “A sense of purpose struck me, so intense it caused a searing heat in my chest, as if I were being shocked back to life.” 

Jane becomes obsessed about solving who killed Indira Babatunde and why her father decided to stop taking his medication – and she joins an online true-crime forum, a mix of amateur and experienced investigators who pose questions, examine clues. develop theories – not to mention accessing bank records and hacking computer accounts. The site is open to true crime followers of all levels, and anything goes as members compete to find answers - unlike police who must follow  the law, preserve evidence and meet a high standard of proof. And what's stopping a savvy murderer from also logging on to the site to study techniques or follow the progress of any particular investigation?  

Jane is sensitive, observant, when examining photograph and documents – and she also reads people well, asking astute questions and pinpointing leads from the start. The obsession leads Jane to drop out of college and lose her job at Starbucks, but she also attracts the attention of a private subgroup, an exclusive group of true crime aficionados who soon focus on the murder of three college students in Idaho. With little money and fewer friends, Jane is astonished by the sudden twist in her life: “I’ve come to think fate is a trap we set for ourselves.” 

More than halfway through the book, soon after a second set of women are murdered, Jane travels to Idaho to examine the scene of the crime and meet her fellow sleuths in person. Early encounters are awkward: “My world was one of flat, 2D text, where people wearing anime avatar masks ruled comment threads with pithy quips and takedowns, and you weren’t forced to be present, three-dimensional, accountable to the face and body to which you’d been born. Mine was the brave new frontier, and this world, where people were beautiful and charming and it still mattered, was the old and antiquated. I’d never fit in here. Long live the internet, the revenge of the nerds.”

Two of the sleuths are older and parental figures. Former detective George Lightly notices a plastic bag of ashes on her desk, knows her father recently died and gives her an urn with the words, “It’s what we will never know about the ones we love that binds us to them.”

Along the way, the group resolves the murders in Idaho despite some misdirection from the murderer. Authorities prefer their theory about the first and reject Jane’s theory about different killers for each set of murders. And she remains persistent in trying to find out why her father stopped taking his medication and why he refused to lose weight, Jane gathers a few answers about an abusive childhood and a secret hobby – but not enough to understand his motivation. Still, the father's writing triggers an idea on how to resolve the two Idaho cases with one proverbial stone.

Jane evolves and matures over the course of 432 pages, sometimes rationalizing and other times feeling a measure of a guilt about investigation shortcuts. Securing justice for the murder victims is enough for Jane and the fast-paced novel – and it doesn’t matter if the public doesn’t have a clue about what really happened in Idaho. 

Self-reliance

 

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore tells the story of a camp named Self-Reliance in the Adirondacks, owned by a family that is anything but self-reliant. Instead, the family thrives on lies, secrets and inequality.

Peter Van Laar, wealthy and proud of his numerous New York business connections, owns a children’s the summer camp that has been in the family for three generations. A small town nearby, Shattuck, supplies cooks, groundskeepers and maids who appreciate steady work in the rural setting and are willing to keep secrets to protect the Van Laars and their own families.

Alice, Peter’s wife, is timid and fragile, and the couple has two children, Bear and Barbara. The siblings, destined to never meet, are nothing like the parents nor each other, yet both display deep appreciation for the forest as well as kind and attentive camp staffers.  

In 1961, Bear goes missing and is presumed dead. A grounds man who had befriended the boy has a heart attack soon after the search begins and becomes an easy scapegoat for the authorities. The boy’s body is never found. 

The couple quickly has another child, Barbara, who is difficult and unconcerned about her appearance. Alice, insecure and unnerved by her husband’s age and ambition, tries to raise Barbara as she was raised, believing “that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction.” 

In 1975, Barbara vanishes from the camp. 

Camp counselors are typically former campers from the wealthy families, but Louise, Barbara's counselor, stands out for growing up in Shattuck and not completing college. Instead, she obtained the competitive position after dating John Paul, son of one of Van Laar's wealthy friends.  Theirs is an unlikely match though: Louise is a poor local, who “continually found herself entangled in tricky situations without meaning to be, and at last she resigned herself to the idea that in a place as small as Shattuck, no one was permitted to be invisible. She was pretty, athletic, intelligent, but also poor, and the daughter of an alcoholic.”

John Paul abuses various substances and manipulates Louise, pretending the two are engaged but keeping the relationship a secret from friends and family. Alice sees the flaws in John Paul and other children of her husband’s friends. They “already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.” But since Bear's death, Alice is unstable and quiet, relying on medication and alcohol to get through each day.

When Bárbara goes missing, John Paul takes off in his car and is later arrested for drunk driving. Bloodied clothes are found in his car, and he claims they were given to him by Louise. History repeats and she immediately becomes a suspect.  

Fortunately, the young state police investigator has experience observing entitlement and inequality in action, noting that the rich, “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

A few townspeople bitterly recall the unfair accusations associated with Bear’s disappearance from years before, and they assist Louise in large ways and small. 

In the end, both Van Laar children are found – one dead and the other alive. And the investigator realizes that the poor are truly the self-reliant ones. They do fine and “don’t need on anyone but themselves.” On the other hand, “it’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.” 

Threats lurk in the woods surrounding the camp, but there are also “gods” who may come to the rescue. 

Disaster prep

 

Two elegantly simply plotlines intertwine in Tilt by Emma Pattee: The first is a day in Portland, Oregon, when the Cascadia earthquake strikes, bringing chaos to the city, and the story of a pregnant woman walking miles to connect with her husband. The second is the backstory to their 14-year relationship. The would-be actor and playwright met as young adults, the same age as college students who tried to jumpstart their careers, “but we were not students at a college. A fact that we never said out loud but it was in every sentence. We were on step behind where we thought we should be.”

Time passes, and the couple abruptly find themselves in their thirties with a child on the way, struggling to keep up. “Summer is really over. In a moment, it’ll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”

The husband still pursues an acting career, working at a coffee shop with flexible hours while the wife puts her writing aside after finding an office job with healthcare benefits. The earthquake pushes any dreams for the future aside. There is no cell service, few passable roads, houses and bridges are down, and readers are left in suspense about why a woman so close to giving birth would ever walk miles to the distant coffee shop rather than home or hospital. The couple had sat through an earthquake preparation class a few years earlier, the husband preparing for a tryout for a role role as a geologist. Yet that memory includes no mention of a key recommendation for any disaster: Family members should plan a meeting place in advance.

The two plots collide with the conclusion, the protagonist's motivation becoming clear, with recollection of a conversation between the wife and husband the previous night. She vows to make a new start, to head to L.A, to quit her job, to write her play. “And if I ever see your father again, I will tell him that I get it now, that stuck is stuck is stuck…. That he’s big-time to me. He is time to me.”

Disasters can strike suddenly and broadly, destroying an entire region, or roll in with slow motion, touching one family at a time.

Despair

Some people deny the horrors of genocide, hoping to protect the reputation of their country or community. Some listen but quickly set the past aside and move on. Others are left devastated. 

We Do Not Part by Han Tang, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, examines the response of two women years later to atrocities committed around the Korean War. The colleagues, one a writer and the other a photographer/videographer, both talented and compassionate, document the atrocities. A friendship forms and the unsettling subject matter inevitably intrudes and disrupts their own lives, eroding productivity and prompting nightmares. “Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?” explains Kyungha. 

The collaboration ends after Kyungha enters a doomed marriage and Inseon abruptly takes up carpentry and returns home to care for a mother losing her memories. Before the separation, Kyungha describes a recurring nightmare – blackened tree stumps shrouded in snow – and the two women plan to produce a short film based on the imagery, with the slim hope that such a project might vanquish the nightmares. 

Four years pass, leaving Kyungha certain the film will never be made, yet friendship, mutual respect and shared pain endure. “There are people who actively change the course of their own life,” Kyungha says of Inseon. “They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So in that time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

Inseon enters a hospital in Seoul after slicing her fingers while cutting wood and she calls Kyungha with a favor – travel to Jeju Island, about 150 kilometers from the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, during an intensifying snowstorm and rescue a lone white songbird left forgotten in its cage. 

Kyungha makes the trip and trapped by the weather and her own deep depression she wanders about her friend’s home, examining the meticulous research compiled by Inseon about the widespread massacres conducted on the island between1948 and 1949.  

June of this year marked the 75th anniversary of when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, often referred to as the start of what many call the forgotten war. Fighting and divisions began earlier though, explains Grace Cho for the Nation, even as the US Army Military Government in Korea was the governing body of South Korea after World War II. 

Elections in 1948 formally separated the South and North, Cho explains, though the Soviet-controlled North rejected UN monitoring and many Koreans from both sides opposed permanent division. 

“Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea,” Cho writes  With protests, strikes, and a growing insurgency, Jeju island was branded a “red island." In 1948, “an all-out offensive” against a band of an estimated a small group of guerilla fighters, estimated to number no more than 500, resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 people, or 10 percent of the island's population.” 

A US naval blockade prevented those who tried to escape. Anti-communist fervor continued throughout the Korean War with critics jailed, newspapers closed, and the Bodo League killing up to 300,000 people regarded as communist or sympathizers and other political prisoners. 

Over the years, authorities targeted family members of Jeju Island victims who asked questions and tried to investigate. “Unlike other Korean War massacres that were partly motivated by uncertainty about whether enemy soldiers might be hiding among civilians, the Bodo League massacres cannot be called ‘collateral damage’ or chalked up to ‘the fog of war,’” Cho goes on to explain. “They were highly coordinated, carried out simultaneously across several provinces of South Korea, and the groundwork for them had been laid in April 1949. While the registry began as a list of people to be re-educated, it turned into a slate of people to be killed during a national emergency, a reminder that surveillance of political groups can quickly escalate into something much darker.“

The novel recalls the Jeju Island massacre’s influence on one family. Some villagers resisted and others collaborated; years later, some went silent and others questioned and protested.  

Years of shame, denial, persecution and official subterfuge eliminated much of the historical record. Inseon's older, quiet parents protect their young daughter from the worst details early on, but as a teenager, she resents the quiet secrets, harboring hatred especially for her mother. At 17, she runs away to Seoul and after an accident wakes to her mother’s presence. Only then her mother, among the few who pressed for answers, shares what she knows about the massacre and the relatives who vanished. 

Inseon adopts her mother's determination to uncover the lost history, at one point searching for the homesite where her father once lived before the village was ravaged by fire: “it was easy to tell from the lack of trees where the houses and paths had been.” But questions go unanswered. “Not when I’d never been told how big his childhood home had been nor on which side of the village it had stood.” 

An uncle was 19 when the massacre took place and his parents worried because “he was the only man at home within the age range the soldiers and police were likely to suspect of communicating with the guerrillas in the hills.” With rumors of torture and executions, the parents convinced their son to hide in nearby hills. “He heard whistles and saw the homes burning but instinct told him to stay hidden,”  later returning to find the village destroyed and most of his family dead.  

“[I]t’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer,” the novel states. “The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization.” Members of a youth league were trained, infused with resentment against communities holding different beliefs. “The murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded…” 

The poetic quality of  Han's prose is inescapable. At one point, alone in Inseon’s home, Kyungha places her hand over a photo of bones. “Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away. Over what was no longer human – no. Over what remained human even now.”

Inseon’s findings are devastating for Kyungha, depressed before she began her journey, and the novel ends with her giving up on life, leaving shelter during the snowstorm and laying down to sleep. “Rapt in that strange, intense passion – and I couldn’t tell if it was excruciating pain or ecstasy – I walked through the biting wind, through the countless gathered who wore bodies spun from the wind. In that profound, uncanny euphoria, feeling my heart might rip open, I knew.”

The characters understand too well that leaders can instigate followers to turn on others easily, willingly. There is no guarantee that the resentment and hatred fueling genocide can’t happen again. 

The South Korean government issued an apology in 2003, and the police and defense ministry followed suit in 2019.  In April of this year, the executive board of UNESCO recognized the Jeju Massacre documents, as well as the truth-telling campaign that followed as “world heritage that belongs to all.”

Han's title refers to more than a friendship, but also to atrocities than can haunt with increasing intensity over the years, challenging societies or individuals who struggle to suppress the truth. 

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Pryer wrote a 2014 essay about "Moral Injury: What Leaders Don't Mention When They Talk of War."  Pryer quotes Jonathan Shay from his 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character: "Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated."

The essay concludes: "Human beings are creatures of passion, and war displays this passion at its noblest and cruelest extremes. It stands to reason that our nation will not always choose only just wars to wage and that servicemembers will not always perform just combat actions. Nevertheless, human beings are also governed by moral forces. The great cost of underestimating these forces in the information age is surely too great to go long unnoticed and inadequately addressed. Our nation will not always be able to wage just wars justly, but we must try much harder to do so."