Secrets. Every family’s got them, and no matter how garden variety the categories may be, each one can cause its own exquisite pain. Two books I read this week delve into those secrets, the costs of keeping them, and what happens when they come out in the open: All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.
All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López
This slim collection of short stories from Spain contains six sharp looks at different kinds of family secrets: abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy, sexual orientation, adultery, and the process of dying. As most successful short story writers do, López has centered these narratives around key moments so that we’re immediately in the mix.
The story I most connected to, for personal reasons, was “The Week of Goodbye,” where the narrator recounts the process of watching their father die in the hospital on a day-by-day basis. It sounds bleak, but what López captures is instead the incredible variety of what happens: relatives who need something, a visit from an old friend, an improvement, a decline, and always, the background of the hospital itself which continues long after any one patient’s stay. This story reminded me of what can be so glorious in a short story—that finding of all of life as represented in one small set of moments.
This is the kind of book where you can read one story, close the book, and then think about the ramifications of those few pages all day long.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
On the other side of the brevity spectrum is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye which chronicles life in a small Ohio town over the period of an entire life. The story centers on the Jenkins and Salt families and the way their lives entwine over time. As with All the Things We Don’t Say, there are secrets here, including adultery, sexual orientation, and abandonment, and those secrets shape the destinies of everyone involved. Because it’s such a sweeping book, Ryan can linger on the social events that background (and shape) their lives as well, including wars and the Civil Rights movement.
I happened to be watching War Sailor, a show about Norwegian merchant marines who were effectively drafted into permanent, deadly service delivering supplies during World War II, on Netflix at the same time as reading this book, which made the descriptions of Felix Salt’s time in the Navy feel especially visceral and harrowing.
Buckeye also deals with death, both sudden and prolonged, and I think the thing I will carry longest out of this reading is the way one virtual stranger aids a couple in the depth of their grief. It is simple and pure and perfect.
Both books are reserved, though, and while characters’ actions make sense, there’s a level of pulling back from their emotions that made me long for them to explore what was happening underneath. Easier in a novel than a short story, of course, but if everyone had said what they were feeling in Buckeye the actions of the characters would have had to have been different and the overall feeling would have been very different, too. And sometimes, when the conversation is had, we see how very little it would have changed anyway. In that way, Buckeye simultaneously begs you to have the conversations you’ve never had and also reminds you that you probably already know what you’re going to learn.
If you’re interested in reading about other people’s secrets, pick up a copy of All the Things We Don’t Say or Buckeye from Bookshop.org. If you use either of those links, I earn a commission.
Though Robert Grainier is said in Train Dreams not to have made it much farther into Montana than Libby, the setting of both stories is similar, both in place and time, though the main action of A River Runs Through It covers a shorter span. Part of what I will always love about these movies, then, is that they remind me of where I grew up. More on imagery below, but there are moments in Train Dreams where I saw the specific texture of bark and the particular splay of needles and thought, “I know that tree!” Both do an excellent job of capturing the expanse of the quiet landscape of the Inland Northwest.
Whereas I can no longer separate the film and book of A River Runs Through It, because they mirror each other so closely and because I’ve read and watched them so many times, I cannot remember reading Train Dreams, though I imagine it was a quiet book and meditative because the movie is this way (and you don’t usually remove the splashy bits when going from page to screen). What I will carry forward from Train Dreams is the imagery, which is perhaps even stronger than the imagery in A River Runs Through It (as beautiful as that was). 
The book centers on twin sisters, Agni and Effie who live with their Greek-born parents in Astoria, Queens while going to college. Effie is wilder and Agni quieter, and the fact that they are twins already gives us a chance to explore two ways of blooming from the same circumstance. But because of their heritage and close family ties, we get two other what ifs: living the diaspora or returning home and whether to embrace the city or the country.
It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the title of this essay refers to a garage door opener. At the event, Zeller told us how she laughed every time she used it to open her large garage in a subdivision of Spokane. One of the many places she lived as a child was in a garage and this essay blends clips from her HOA’s bylaws with details of her childhood as well as things she learned about class in the process of becoming an educator. She also writes about the complex feelings around making a more permanent home, first in the city and then in the suburbs.
While most of the poems in this volume exist in others I have on my shelf (and I was disappointed the poems appeared only in English), this slim volume presents a voice of its own that I will happily hold onto because of the way the selected poems play against each other to reveal things I haven’t seen in the work before. The book also contains Szymborksa’s Nobel speech, which is poetry in and of itself. This is a great book for readers who are new to Szymborska or for those who want to take a fresh look at poems (and a poet) they thought they knew.