Book reviews: Two B.C. journalists pen powerful personal stories
Tara McGuire’s Holden After and Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose and Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed are compelling, moving reads
B.C. BROADCASTER Tara McGuire’s forthcoming Holden After and Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose (Arsenal Pulp Press, September 27) is as devastating as its title implies yet so gripping you might find yourself reading it in a single sitting.
It’s one of two deeply intimate, highly compelling stories to come from a Vancouver journalist this year, along with Marsha Lederman’s Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed (McClelland & Stewart).
McGuire’s son died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2015, a year after the opioid crisis was declared. She plumbs the depths of grief in her new book, her first, taking readers to that awful afternoon when a police officer showed up at her home with the news. She and her husband (Holden’s stepfather) and their 11-year-old daughter had just returned from nearly a year of travelling, and at the time of the knock on the door, she was unpacking groceries, getting ready to have Holden over for dinner that night. She recounts each second of that seemingly endless day and the dreadful period that followed in vivid, gut-wrenching detail—the wailing, how she could barely breathe. An extraordinary writer, McGuire reveals the most personal of thoughts, including the way she will forever question the family’s decision to leave to see the world when they did and how things may have gone differently for Holden, if at all.
Tara McGuire. Photo by Jane Thomson Photography
But Holden After and Before is not merely a hauntingly deep expression of mourning (or what McGuire calls “mourning sickness”); it is also a mother’s search for understanding, for answers about how Holden ended up dying in his ex-girlfriend’s Gastown apartment, what was happening in the minutiae his life leading up to that moment. He didn’t want to die; he asked his friend to wake him up for work the next morning, and he had talked about taking time to focus on his physical and mental health.
McGuire tries to fill in blanks by going through his belongings at home and messages on his phone; she relays her sheer frustration over Facebook refusing to give her access to his account. She connects with his friends and coworkers to see if they can shed any light on his state of mind during his last little while on Earth; many share what they knew and what they loved about him—he was fun, funny, smart, and caring. Parts of the book are written as scenarios unfolding from her son’s point of view, as she imagined them. McGuire calls it “informed fiction”.
In the book, McGuire confesses that she didn’t know what she was working on as she was writing but that she felt compelled to put things down in words. Contrary to what many people around her assumed, the process felt more harmful to her than helpful.
“Learning what I could about the escalation of Holden’s substance use and writing it all down was the opposite of cathartic; it left me confused, scared, and anxious,” McGuire writes. “I operated under the delusion that by uncovering details of Holden’s last year, I could intersect time and prevent what had already happened from happening. I worried about my own mental health, which made me more empathetic to Holden’s mental health. Time looped, and some days I received fresh burns that blistered. Long bouts of weeping continued, and I often went days without leaving the house or talking to anyone.”
So why did she write it?
“Because not talking perpetuates the suffering,” McGuire says in the afterword. “More of the same silence that causes substance users to feel ashamed, judged, and isolated will not protect anyone, change anything, nor prevent any more deaths. When we remain quiet, the burden continues to be carried by those who cannot bear it. Through dialogue, we have the opportunity to open our minds and our hearts.”
Marsha Lederman. Photo by Ben Nelms
DIVORCE, BY ALL accounts, is difficult, even if it’s “for the best”. When the shadow of the Holocaust hangs over it, it can be debilitating.
Marsha Lederman explores the connections between the dissolution of her marriage and intergenerational trauma stemming from Nazi Germany in Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed.
Lederman’s grandparents were murdered in concentration camps; her parents were labour-camp slaves. Meticulously researched, Kiss the Red Stairs is a potent mix of personal, familial, and world history; raw emotion and brutally honest self-reflection; and psychology and science, written with the confidence and clarity of a seasoned journalist and the frankness and vulnerability of a dear friend.
After Lederman’s divorce, which she did not see coming, it took the Toronto-born, Vancouver-based Globe and Mail writer about three years to get to a point of relative happiness. Around the time her world was starting to fall apart, the field of the intergenerational transmission of trauma was just beginning to accelerate. As she began the long journey of healing and recovering from her marital breakdown, Lederman started to carefully consider the possibility that she, like other Holocaust descendants, may have inherited her parents’ trauma on a cellular level, making it that much harder for her to bounce back from her own. And she learned that this transference of trauma could help explain not only why she was in such a dark place in the wake of her marital breakdown but also why she had so often, throughout her life, felt so extraordinarily sad or tended to expect the worst.
Lederman deftly weaves together several threads: references to and insights from Holocaust survivors such as Viktor Frankl and Robert Krell; significant highlights of career, such as interviews with Fred Herzog and Bono; and memories—of conversations with her parents and some of the horrors they shared with her; of moments that hit her especially hard while she was still living with the man she thought she’d be with forever and after he left and while learning to co-parent their son.
Kiss the Red Stairs is a fascinating read filled with depth, complexity, and even humour.
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