Without You Here

Hobbs Hesler offers intertwined stories of a woman and her niece, who both deal with mental illness and generational trauma.

Nonie, an imaginative, kind, and generous person, feels unlovable, alone and adrift. Growing up in the 1960s,she suffers from “shivers” and “sadness” that only intensify as she gets older. Her mother is rigid and unyielding as she attempts to save the child from the same fate as her depressed uncle, but she’s unsuccessful; Nonie dies by suicide at the age of 27. Her sister, Ruth, wrestles with the guilt of being unable to save her younger sibling, ruminating regularly about what more she could have done. Ruth’s daughter, Noreen, misses Nonie terrible, as her aunt Nonie always had a candy bar for her, played on the tire swing, and laid back and gazed at the clouds by her side. Noreen analyzes her loved one’s suicide and integrates the tragedy into her own sense of self while navigating a lonely adolescence; later, she finds herself clinging to a bad marriage, as if it’s a ballast against a storm. She’s afraid to tell anyone, but she gets “jitters” like her aunt did, and she has “cloud days” when she feels untethered from the world; her mother fears that Noreen is headed for a tragic fate, as well, and this weighs heavily on the young girl. Hobbs Hesler’s deeply felt narrative explores mental health, grief, feelings of being misunderstood, and complex family and friend relationships with nuance and care. Clean prose and effective imagery (such as Noreen’s “fleeting sense that the world’s orbit is about to hiccup and hurl her into nothingness to fall and fall and fall and never land again”) fully immerse the reader into Nonie and Noreen’s inner worlds. Throughout, the novel empathetically depicts decades-spanning effects of trauma, and the different ways that its main characters manage them.

A beautiful fictional exploration of a troubled family history.