MAKING UP STORIES

In Hayes’ novel, a dying mother reveals to her daughter her family’s long history of trauma in the hope she can break free of it.

Dying in hospice care, Savannah Schaeffer, a 72-year-old retired professor of psychology, decides she has no choice but to reveal to her daughter Chloe the grim history of “intergenerational trauma” in her family.  Chloe is a successful physician but has an inclination toward romantic failure; she is poised to marry Dwayne, another psychologist, a decision Savannah believes is a dire mistake. To emancipate Chloe from the legacy of pain that lives deep in the family’s marrow, Savannah (whose mother died by suicide when Savannah was only 15 years old) believes that her daughter needs to be exposed to the details of its “toxic brew,” an achingly heroic charge movingly described by the author. To that end, Savannah gives to Chloe two journals—one written by her grandmother Hildegard and another by her father Johan, both of which chronicle nearly incomprehensible emotional challenges. Hildegard’s life was filled with pain and danger—she suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a mercurially violent husband named Markus and was afflicted with terrible depression and mental illness. Johan weathered the abuse of Markus as well, and finally killed him, as well as his own brother, and he experienced the unspeakable ravages of World War II. Chloe is mesmerized by the successive revelations about her lineage, as well as by her mother’s newly discovered open-handedness, a great departure for a woman for whom “leaving things unsaid is in her DNA.” Chloe must contend with the truth about her family, and also consider the kind of life she wants to lead (and whether Dwayne will be a part of it). She is further conflicted about Savannah’s decision to “hasten her death” and her own participation in that process as a palliative care doctor.

Hayes’ sprawling saga, composed of the main narrative and excerpts from the two journals, is delicately complex and emotionally affecting. Chloe is compelled to confront the possibility that all of this cumulative trauma somehow lives within her and affects the decisions that shape her life. “Their lives are mine now as if I had lived them. They live inside me, shaping who I am and my choices. A genetic echo. They always have been, but I now consciously know they always have been.” However, that acknowledgment doesn’t means she must accept the life Savannah envisions for her—Chloe must not only come to terms with a past she never experienced and shoulder it like painful freight but also forge ahead and create her own path. A novel so steeped in psychological ideas is threatened by two pitfalls—the tendency to become academically arid or to lecture the reader while relying upon banal platitudes. Impressively, Hayes manages to avoid both of these—this is a genuinely engrossing story, wise but never sententious. Moreover, it is an inspiring one—the past can never be escaped, but that does not mean it must serve as a destiny.

A captivating novel, intellectually stimulating and literarily engrossing.