Parsing the Difficult Passages
About ninety pages into Julia Phillips’s new novel, Bear, I encountered one of those put-down-the-book-and-stare passages that anyone who is passionate about reading and writing savors. This particular paragraph concerns the two sisters at the novel’s heart, Sam and Elena, who are quite literally “standing at their mother’s death’s door.” Suffering from terminal lung disease, their mother represents loss, naturally, but also, for one sister at least, the hopeful promise of salvation, a new lease on life, untethered from medical bills and the family’s dilapidated house. This dichotomy is compelling enough, but the writing that resonated—and, honestly, nearly broke me—centers on the mother’s slow decline, her prolonged physical failing that takes place just out of frame through most of the novel, in the perpetually dim light of evening, always just a room away from the action. “When they first learned her diagnosis, the sisters had cried over it together,” Phillips writes. “Sam felt shattered. That was back when she pictured pain as something swift and final. She understood better, now, what it actually was—not a glass dropped onto a tile floor, one terrible burst, but a tree required to grow over years in a space that limited it. Branches curled in on themselves, leaves dropping. A living thing that was forced, relentlessly, to submit.” Pain as a tree. Nothing jaw-dropping about seeing it this way; look at an illustration of the nervous system and the metaphor is clear enough. But that’s not the kind of terrible branching or flowering that Phillips is describing. In the author’s view, it is a beautiful thing horrifically restricted, growing in on itself, reminded of its limitations—and those who are forced to witness it, trapped in a relentless sorrow. “If Sam’s heart broke from the loss, then it broke; what difference did having a whole heart make anyhow? Let it be destroyed,” she writes. “She just needed the long ache to stop.”
Writers, quite simply, parse the difficult passages. They urge us to examine that which we may otherwise avoid or ignore. I’d like to think that to some extent the writers in each issue of this magazine do something similar, albeit sometimes on a far less emotional level. In this issue, for example, writers explore the particulars of the author-agent relationship, the art of indie bookstore event queries, the power and freedom of writing while incarcerated, and more. Whether we’re hurting or just a little confused, uncertain, writers help make clear life’s opaque chapters.
