LIKE WATER SLIPPING THROUGH MY FINGERS

Poole’s memoir recounts time spent with a troubled family member in New York City.

Back in 1963, when the author was a teenager living in a small town in North Carolina, she wound up spending a summer in Brooklyn, New York. She was there to babysit for her cousin Jimmy and his wife Delores. In 1972, Delores threw her 23-month-old baby off the roof of an eight-story building and then jumped off herself. This information about Delores’ suicide, revealed at the beginning of the book, casts an eerie pallor over everything else that is to come. Twenty-four-year-old Delores was considered something of a free spirit in 1963; she would do things like go out to nightclubs even though she had a husband and children at home. Such activities could be deemed scandalous at the time, but this didn’t seem to bother Delores. In Poole’s fond recollections of trips with Delores and others to places like Coney Island and the Apollo theater, she describes Delores as the big sister she had never had. But the fun was not to last. Ten years later, the author returned to Brooklyn to find that things had changed: Delores’ relationship with Jimmy had disintegrated, and she was exhibiting bizarre behavior, talking about angels and demons in the world. As the author phrases it, “The Delores I had known was already gone.” The journey to this state takes some time; some portions of the narrative are not particularly eventful, such as when the author takes a boat ride on the Hudson. Still, readers learn much about the time period, from the fashion to the food to the things one encounters when one is 16 and “somewhat naïve but not clueless.” As a snapshot of an era and a personal account of a troubled woman’s tragic decline, the work is undeniably memorable.

A brief yet intricate and fascinating account of not only a special place and time, but also a relative’s sad mental breakdown.