Photoessay #1094 - After the Fire

After the Fire - J. A. Jance

I love my Guided Autobiography class. Every week the instructor suggests memoirs for us to read. And class members also make their recommendations. I will definitely recommend this book this week. I listened to it and I found it compelling and lyrical yet personal and grounded.

You might recognize the author as a popular Seattle based mystery writer. In fact, I have an audiotape of one of her books racking up overdue fines right upstairs. Plus she will be making an appearance at Third Place Books not a mile away from my home on July 27.

This memoir is really an annotated collection of poetry that she secretly wrote in the late 1970s through 1984 chronicling her life during her 18 year marriage to a heavy drinking self-destructing alcoholic. Feminism also plays a part as she endorses these new ideas not realizing that she's living her own life as a sacrificing submissive wife. Bitterness at being excluded from the creative writing program at the University of Arizona because of her gender and her husband's decree that the only writer in their house would be HIM fueled her dedication to write, though she didn't start until she left her husband and moved with her two young children to Seattle selling life insurance for a living.

The pieces ring true to those coping with family members experiencing addiction. At the time, she thought she was writing 'art' but years later, she recognizes she really was journaling her own story. She eloquently sets the stage for each poem and then reads it. But her poetry and images are so integrated into her own self that often I didn't know if I was listening to the poem or its commentary. You experience with her the recognition that she could not save him, she nearly destroyed herself with her enabling behavior. She illustrates the last straw when attending her child's t-ball game, he had drunk so much by 5pm that he had to crawl back to the car on his hands and knees. He died 18 months after she divorced him of acute alcoholism. In some ways, she still felt tenderly towards him but she recognized that if she had not been able to save him after 18 years of marriage, it was never possible. She subsequently met her second husband at a grief group and, as far as I know, is still happily married.

An eloquent memoir that clearly captures the time and the destruction of addiction.