GATHERING

A Californian family grapples with a tragic and unexpected loss in retired educator Truxaw’s memoir.

The death of the author’s brother Bobby in a car accident occurred the day after the young man’s 21st birthday in 1969.The Truxaw family and Bobby’s friends were devastated by the abrupt loss, and the author devotes time to exploring how each member of her family, a large Irish-Catholic clan of eight children, handled grief differently, including herself. She was a student at the University of California, Irvine, in the ’60s, and both Bobby and their mother worried about how she’d be influenced by drug-taking “hippies” and “longhairs”; Truxaw developed an alcohol addiction in the wake of her brother’s death, with which she would struggle for 20 years. The author cites a genetic predisposition to mental illness and addiction behaviors, and she notes that her older sister, Maureen, would later deal with an addiction to pain medication. Bobby’s loss was the first of several tragedies for the Truxaw family, including Maureen’s sudden death in 2017, younger sister Evie’s cancer diagnosis in 2009, and other members’ mental health struggles. Truxaw skillfully documents these complicated stories and effectively pinpoints Bobby’s death as a pivotal moment in the family members’ lives, lamenting how different things might have been if they’d all received grief counseling or other therapy in the aftermath. The author captures the complicated, messy, and devastating grieving process they shared in a collection of intimate, personal pieces written between 2012 and 2024, which include some of Truxaw’s own poetry. The resulting book, which the author says she wrote primarily for her family, can feel quite fragmented and disjointed at times. However, the author shows great compassion and understanding for those who’ve lost loved ones, which readers in similar situations may appreciate.

A book that intimately captures the destructiveness of unaddressed grief.