One of the main reasons I read books is to learn more about other humans and deepen my own understanding of my own life. That’s a long way to say that reading makes me less lonely, but at the best of times, reading is also like spending time with that one friend who sees the world clearly and who will tell you the whole truth. Let me share with you the three authors who recently gave me the gift of that spine-tingly “oh my god that IS how people work” revelation: Susan Choi in Flashlight, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe in Thunder Song and Jenny Erpenbeck in Kairos.

Flashlight by Susan Choi

My uncle, one of the most faithful readers of this blog, recommended this book to me very soon after it was published and I rushed out and bought it this last week when it finally reached paperback. The book revolves primarily around Anne, Serk, and their daughter Louisa. Anne and Serk are both estranged from their families which makes for the small microcosm of a family where people can really push each other’s buttons. I won’t go too far into the story (Serk disappears from the beach one night in Japan, leaving a young Louisa drowning on the shore and Anne and Louisa suffer estrangement as well) because Choi beautifully weaves us back and forth in time to illustrate other parts of the family (and extended family) dynamics in a way that can only be properly experienced by reading the book yourself.

What brought the book to mind today was how insightfully Choi captures little details of the characters to really place us inside their minds and their relationships. Take this moment between Anne and Louisa:

After a moment of silent travel, Anne risks a glance in the rearview mirror. Louisa stares down at her book, almost certainly at the wrong page. Anne cannot make it up to Louisa without undercutting her own authority. It crosses her mind that she behaves worst to Louisa when already worried she’s not doing well. Then, Louisa’s mere existence seems to throw emphasis on Anne’s shortcomings, and Anne in self- defense throws guilt and blame back, which against justice stick. Louisa is a high-strung, fastidious child, always quick to believe she has failed. – Susan Choi, Flashlight

Oh, Nelly. Anyone who has ever been a child or parent probably does not need the context of this moment to feel the charge of it, how deeply it’s rooted in the dynamics between the characters, or how inescapable it appears to be. Between the insight into what Anne is thinking, the judgement (Anne’s? Louisa’s? does it matter?) of Louisa’s character, and Louisa’s actions of closing herself off as the one protection she has, this paragraph could have been a short story on its own.

As I read Flashlight, I kept confusing Louisa for Anne, in that I was flipping the role of parent and child. While I don’t think Choi meant for me to completely switch them in my mind, the role reversal is far from accidental as paragraphs like the above show how unhealed Anne is from her own childhood wounds and how that creates a gap into which Louisa must step, adultifying the child. Later, when the (actually) adult Louisa realizes, “her mother seemed to take questions as a form of criticism” her own growth gave me a little light into where I, too, can grow.

I do not mean to imply that Anne and Louisa are the only interesting characters in this book. In fact, in the middle when we lose Serk the book sagged a bit for me (but the energy came back and I very happily finished the book). The magic of the book is that each character is as carefully drawn as these two are, as are the relationships between them all. It’s magic.

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

Thunder Song, by contrast, is a collection of essays by Pacific Northwest writer Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. I’d seen reviews for her previous book, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk but never gotten around to reading it. But this week I was stuck on an essay of my own and so I picked up Thunder Song to see what it could teach me about form. Instead, the essays were so engrossing in their own right that a structural read will have to wait. LaPointe writes on subjects from Native healing to the feminist punk scene, miscarriage and abuse, and I felt myself wishing our paths had crossed at some point in our Pacific Northwest lives, because we are a similar age and I think we’d have a lot to talk about.

This book is well worth the read even if you never had the chance to shop at Larry’s on Aurora, though, and LaPointe’s carefully drawn relationships are as insightful as Choi’s (which I think is even harder to do when you are dealing with real people). One relationship where the charged energy is especially well drawn is that with her mother in passages like this:

“We’d have screaming matches and big blowouts. It was easier to leave than to face the complexity of my pain; the truth that I felt unprotected by her or that she had somehow failed me as a parent was too big to unpack at fourteen.” – “Licorice Fern” from Thunder Song, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

The beauty and poignancy come in the kind of layered thinking that happens when you are open to the actual experience, not the baggage from before:

“But that day in Swan Creek a sort of softness happened between us. I was rigid with worry, expecting news or some new revelation that would once again remind me that I was alone. That the mother I had was gone, missing in her own healing. I braced myself for something I had learned to do at a young age, to worry and wonder about my mother, to tiptoe and be careful.” – “Licorice Fern” from Thunder Song, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

In the end, she writes, “I have compassion for my mother, and it does not translate as rage these days. I see her wounds reflected in my own. I understand the way they worked to keep us quiet.” Thunder Song is filled with this kind of clarity and insight on so many topics and so many different types of relationships. I took it personally in the best of ways (not just because one of my mother’s favorite songs is “Coat of Many Colors” and I used to embroider jean jackets for my young son), and I look forward to reading it again for pleasure and for craft.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

I was interested in Kairos because the relationship between the young Katharina and the much older Hans takes place in East Berlin and then persists over decades as the Soviet Union unravels. What I did not know was how far into the psyche Erpenbeck would take me with this novel. The book starts HOT. Hans and Katharina meet an are drawn to each other with the obsessive longing of teenagers (except that Hans is 34 years her senior and married with a child):

“At first, Hans counted the days, then the hours, and now—she must be in the train bound for home—he’s counting the minutes…What will he do if she doesn’t return to him? Find another woman to bed, as soon as possible, to displace this memory that, during her absence, has moved unerringly into the center of his preoccupations?” – Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck

The way Erpenbeck delves into their mutual obsession takes this beyond mere romance, though, and I should have guessed earlier than I did that there’s something not right in this relationship (besides the obvious power imbalance). For example, when Katharina follows Hans to the beachside town where he’s vacationing with his wife and child, Erpenbeck uses their sexual chemistry to distract from the fact that this is an unhinged thing to do.

As Katharina grows and experiences more of life, Hans (who has settled already on who he is in life) merely grows jealous and their relationship darkens. What is exquisite about the writing here is how Erpenbeck makes it seem natural for Katharina to turn this on herself and for the two characters to become even more enmeshed the less healthy their relationship becomes. It gets very dark but never ceases to be believable because Erpenbeck captures the very essence of what makes abuse so hard to escape.

This is a very specific book, and I don’t know that I would recommend it widely, but if you want to see the full gamut of what two people can do to one another, I cannot imagine a book that portrays it better. I will say that I was so absorbed in this book that I failed to make any margin notes at all.

If you want to experience the exquisitely drawn humanity in Flashlight, Thunder Song, or Kairos pick up a copy of from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.