Fantastic Fiction

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page

and feel a little as if you have lost a friend

~ Paul Sweeney

 

 

The above quote captures the way the way I felt when I recently finished reading, "The Light Between Oceans." by M.L. Stedman.

 

If you are looking for a book of fiction that will transport you to another time and place, then I would highly recommend "The Light Between Oceans" to you.  It is beautifully written and for a first novel, an amazing piece of storytelling.

 

Essentially, it is a story of stunning loss, healing, the resilience of love and the consequences of choice.

Tom Sherbourne, who has just returned to Australia after four combat filled years on the Western Front, takes a job as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock for the stability and peace of living on an island.  Janus Rock is nearly a day's journey by boat to the nearest coast.  Tom falls in love with Isabel, a young and headstrong girl who returns his affection.  They get married and Tom brings Isabel to the isolated island. 

 

Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries somewhere near a beach.  She discovers that boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

 

I won't tell you anymore for you need to read it for yourself.

 

I would like to point out a particular passage from the book which struck me for its simplicity, clarity and truth.  This will give you a flavor of M.L. Stedman's insight and beautiful touch with regard to the power of letting go of a hurt, a loss or of a heartbreaking tragedy:

 

"She was about to go back inside when she caught sight of the Cape gooseberry bush, and remembered that terrible day after Grace's return when her daughter had wedged herself behind it.  As she sank to her knees in the grass and sobbed, the memory of a conversation with Frank floated into her awareness.  "but how?  How can you just get over these things, darling?" she had asked him.  "You've had so much strife but you're always happy.  How do you do it?"

 

"I choose to," he said.  "I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget."

 

"But it's not that easy."

 

He smiled that Frank smile.  "Oh , but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting.  You only have to forgive once.  To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.  You have to keep remembering all the bad things."  He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow.  "I would have to make a list, a very, very, long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount.  That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No" -- his voice became sober -- "we always have a choice.  All of us."

 

Wild By Cheryl Strayed

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

                     ~ Mary Oliver

                     "The Summer Day"

From the moment I started reading the first words of the New York Times bestseller, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, I couldn't put it down.

 

It has truly been a long time since I have read a book so honest and at the same time so poignant in its telling of a compelling personal story.

 

In hiking the Pacific Crest Trail all by herself from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods that crosses the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border, Cheryl Strayed tests herself physically, mentally and emotionally in ways that many people never do in their whole lives.  And don't ever want do.  Ever.  Talk about pain!  You will never think about hiking boots the same way after reading Wild.

 

But Cheryl Strayed is a beautiful writer and through her unfiltered descriptions of what she is feeling and thinking, she is able to grab you and take you along on her powerful journey as though you are right there with her, step by step, the whole time. 

 

As she treks along the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed slowly finds her inner resources and becomes stronger as she sleeps outdoors, purifies her water (I could feel her thirst), dreams about Snapple lemonade, adjusts to carrying a heavy backpack for miles and miles every day through intense heat and then snowfalls, deals with rattlesnakes and black bears and sometimes just being the only girl on the trail.  As she occasionally meets fellow hikers along the way, I was amazed by the immediate trust and support that most of them felt for each other; as if there was an inner radar that told each of them who was friend and who was foe in the great outdoors.

Grief is what puts Strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail and she describes every raw emotion of it: the falling apart, the sadness, the regrets, the anger, the exhaustion, the inability to wrap your brain around reality.

Just to give you a taste of how Strayed writes, here is a short except:

"There were so many other amazing things in this world.

They opened up inside of me like a river.  Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed.  I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment I was crying my first tears on the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail).  I cried and I cried and I cried.  I wasn't crying because I was happy.  I wasn't crying because I was sad.  I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul.  I was crying because I was full.  Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.

I was entering.  I was leaving.  California streamed behind me like a long silk veil.  I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore.  And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.  I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too."

I don't want to give away what happens to Cheryl Strayed in her amazing book so I will not reveal the particulars of her long distance adventure in the wilderness. You must read it for yourself!
 

Sleepless in Seattle

Tom Hanks and Ross Malinger

When I watch the hysterically funny but poignant movie, "Sleepless in Seattle," one of my favorite scenes is when the character played by actress Rita Wilson tries to explain to  the character played by actor Tom Hanks and the other guys gathered round exactly why the incredibly romantic movie "An Affair To Remember" is only truly understood by women.

She starts to repeat dialogue from "An Affair To Remember" and sets up the scenes with Deborah Kerr (is it pronounced "Kerr" or Carr? I never can remember...") and Cary Grant.  Then Rita Wilson starts to cry as she remembers the ending of the movie and the men are just staring at her like she's crazy.  ("Is she always like this?")  Then the characters played by Tom Hanks and Victor Garber start comparing "An Affair to Remember" to "The Dirty Dozen," a men's movie about World War II and then they start crying about some scene involving guns and bombs and Trini Lopez.  It's all very funny!!!!

 The reason my memory was jogged about "Sleepless In Seattle" had to do with a tweet I read last week from Grief Speaks.  Grief Speaks tweets about loss and also is a website (www.griefspeaks.com) giving support to children, teens and adults who are coping with grief due to all different type of loss.

The tweet reminded me of something some of us are all too familiar with; the poignant side of "Sleepless in Seattle" when Tom Hanks finds himself in the throes of trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other and go on as a newly widowed man and also as a single parent.

The following dialogue from a very different scene in "Sleeepless in Seattle" is right on the money about why it's so hard to let go, to say good-bye, and move forward with your life without that beloved one:

 "Doctor Marcia Fieldstone: People who truly loved once are far more likely to love again. Sam, do you think there's someone out there you could love as much as your wife?

 Sam Baldwin: Well, Dr. Marcia Fieldstone, that's hard to imagine.

Doctor Marcia Fieldstone: What are you going to do?

 Sam Baldwin: Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.

Doctor Marcia Fieldstone: Tell me what was so special about your wife?

Sam Baldwin: Well, how long is your program? Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home... only to no home I'd ever known... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic."