The Lovely Book

I often wait to write until I am inspired or moved. Sometimes I feel inspired but it's just not something I want the whole world to know about, but today, I am inspired.

My new favorite author is Stephanie Kallos. I read her second book, Sing them Home, first. This book was also great. Her stories center on family. On how families drift and flow, how they come apart and back together and sometimes how losing something can also heal something.

Yet her first book I loved even more, especially the characters. They had a depth and came to life in such a way that I miss them already. The book is called "Broken for You"

A quote:

"The broken are not always gathered together, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies," but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them - clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; over roads new-printed with their footsteps, the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities peopled with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stubbornness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgriamage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way." (351)

And finally,

"Look then at the faces and bodies of people you love. The expicit beauty that comes not from the smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience that has left its mark. Each face, each body is its own living fossilized record. A record of cats. combatants, difficult births; of accidents, cruelties, blessings. Reminders of folly, greed, indiscretion, impatience. A moment of time, of memory, preserved, internalized, and enshrined within and upon the body. You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful. If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off peices, rough and random and no two alike." (367)

I would recommend this book highly.

It contains a women suffering a brain tumor, an old house, a strange boarder or two, and a collision of lives. It's a collage of suffering and hope. It is real, raw, and yet lovely. I could only hope to write like this, I could only wish to write in such a way. The words crashing like waves. Waves that are neither this nor that, but everything at once. Words that not only tell fictional stories, but seem to tell my own.