unknown motives
This Week in Reading:
The Blurry Years by Eleanor Kriseman
My friend Eleanor wrote a book (a feat that will never cease to impress me), and it’s getting published (a secondary, but equally impressive accomplishment), and she mailed me a galley, and here we are.
The Blurry Years charts the adolescence of Callie, a young girl coming of age in Florida. Throughout the course of the novel, characters drift in and out of Cal’s life, each vivid and formative, but ultimately temporary. Starr, her mother’s high school friend, pours Callie her first drink at age 12, gives her a navy silk robe, cuts her hair for her. Marcus, the brother of her mother’s boyfriend, takes her up on the roof of his trailer to show her the stars. Johnny, a middle aged man, invites Cal and her best friend back to his apartment the summer after junior high.
It is difficult to parse these characters’ motivations. Are these adults kind to Cal because they love her? Or because they pity her? Is it because they feel sorry for her mother? Or is their attention and generosity rooted in something more sinister? The motivations of Cal’s alcoholic mother, Jeanie, are equally inscrutable. Is Jeanie cruel, or just deeply irresponsible?
At times even Callie’s motivations seem unknown to her. “Sometimes when someone was nice to me it made me want to cry. Or sometimes it made me want to be mean to them, just to see how much they would let me.” She spends her high school years drinking her way through shifts at a local restaurant, fucking washed up older men, just because they are there. It is not a good situation, but it seems, for the most part, consensual. Cal is who she is and is where she is because of circumstances, but also because of choices she has made. There is plenty of room for nuance in The Blurry Years. Kriseman understands that we are always making tiny choices, even in situations we find ourselves in unwillingly. Much of Cal’s life is outside of her control, but she still has agency, even if she can’t explain why she wants what she wants. Is there actually a difference between “things just happening” to us and making decisions that we are unable to explain? Does it matter?
We are always looking for that ever-elusive closure, believing that all we need, really, is an explanation. What were they thinking? Why, why, why, did they do what they did? But we aren’t entitled to the why, and sometimes there is no why at all. And in the end, the why matters less than we think it does. The motivations prompting an action do not change the action itself. Knowing motives can help us reframe events, but it does not undo them.
I am trying to get better at apologizing. I am learning how to say sorry without giving into the temptation of explaining myself. It’s a technique I developed when I was working at a Girl Scout Camp in Alaska. “But I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings” girls would say. “It doesn’t matter what you meant or did not mean to do,” I would tell them, “what matters is that you did.” We try to explain, but what we actually want is to excuse. A good apology, a true apology, requires complete selflessness. An explanation can feel like closure, but in actuality, it is a way of making the apology about you. Intentions are irrelevant at some point-- all that matters is the effect they had. An actual apology requires full accountability: “I am sorry that I did what I did, I am sorry that I caused you pain.” Through snatches of overheard conversations Cal begins to piece together her mom’s history, but while her tragic and difficult past may help explain who Jeanie is now, it does not excuse the dangerous situations she regularly puts her daughter in.
The novel is raw and gutting, full of tiny sentences that left me reeling. (“I felt like I might need a lifetime to learn the true difference between a debt and a favor, and the difference between the kinds of people who could turn the same action into one or the other.”)
I have been reading Eleanor’s writing for years, and this novel is exactly as stunning as I imagined it would be. The Blurry Years comes out July 10th, you can preorder a copy from your local indie bookstore here, or if you must, amazon (sigh).
If you want to read it earlier, you can borrow my copy, but only if you work in Hollywood and promise to give it to your boss so that they will make it into a movie.
Further Reading
Writers are influenced by what they read, so naturally this novel reminded me of the various books I have read upon Eleanor’s recommendation over the years. A few of Eleanor’s recs that I would second: Dare Me by Megan Abbott and Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw.