Built around his father’s suicide, David Vann explores fragments of his life through a series of short stories – some clearly fictional, others more ambiguous. A young boy witnesses his father’s descent into depression, becomes fixated on his father’s new wife, and recounts his isolated life with his mother. In the final piece, now an adult, he returns to the place where his father took his life. Interspersed among the stories is a novella that comes unexpectedly, both striking and devastating, portraying how a person can completely unravel when faced with the unimaginable. Widely awarded in the United States and abroad, this collection is deeply moving – heartbreaking, yet undeniably compelling.
“Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.”