What It Means to Be a Person: A Guest Post by Catherine Newman
Peeling off the layers of family dynamics, Newman’s witty and moving story of love and loss casts a humorous light on life’s ups and downs and the acceptance that follows. Read on for an exclusive essay from Catherine Newman on writing Wreck.
Hardcover
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Wreck: A Novel
Wreck: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$23.99
$26.99
The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
When our daughter was seven, we were swept away, suddenly, by a diagnostic tornado that sucked the breath from my body. There was a lump in her ribcage. . . which turned out to be. . . fine. In those dots were three months of bloodwork, scans, meetings with a pediatric surgeon, and head-scratching. We were in the belly of the beast, and the beast was our inability to know what would happen. The beast was my preemptive feeling of bereftness. “We can’t spare her,” is what I wanted to say to every radiology tech, every doctor, every person scheduling our mystifying appointments. I sat with the heavy-light weight of her second-grade body in my lap, and smelled the warm smell of her tangly braids, which were always pressed against me. I wondered if our lives were undergoing a sea change. Would there be a before and an after? Or would we just be in the purgatory for the rest of our lives?
I mention this now because, in a weird way, my new novel Wreck picks up both of these themes: fear of loss and diagnostic mayhem. Rocky, who you may know from Sandwich, notices a rash on her arm and one minute she is showing it to her dermatologist, and the next she is meeting with a team of doctors and getting scanned and bloodworked to within an inch of her life. She spends most of her life on hold with her insurance company. Results and diagnoses ding into her patient portal every hour of the day and night, and it is impossible for her to understand what anything is or means. She imagines—as I have, given that much of this is very close to home for me—clicking into her portal to discover that she has died.
Meanwhile, a local accident has left a young person dead—someone Rocky’s own young adult children went to high school with—and this loss triggers many of Rocky’s fears about all the different ways we are in danger of losing each other.
There’s a very small subset of folks who will read the passages about Rocky’s medical test results and relate completely—these are my people, and this is your book. But there’s a larger set of folks who (this is my hope) will understand what it means for Rocky to have to grapple with uncertainty. There is so much we can’t know—about what things are or what they mean or how we will survive them—and we just have to keep living anyways. We just have to keep loving people who will eventually die. Bewilderingly, that’s what it means to be a person.
