Having read the memoir, Two Kinds of Decay, both collections of poetry, (Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise) and her story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, I knew one thing for certain: Sarah was a keen observer of the human condition. There is a brand of surety and ferocity in Sarah’s writing that is uniquely hers. The Guardians, an elegy written in memory of her close friend, Harris, who took his own life, is no exception. This book looks to answer the spoken and unspoken questions we have when someone close to us dies. Sarah bravely dissects the inadequate answers we are left with in the wake of anyone’s death, while employing imagination and memory as scaffolding for the painful grief that surrounds any mourning period.

In addition to Sarah’s numerous works, she has been a faculty member of the undergraduate writing program at the Pratt Institute and of the graduate writing programs at Columbia, Fairfield, and the New School universities. She also maintains a private writing studio. Born and raised near Boston, she was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

*

RUMPUS: Tell me how you settled on The Guardians as your title. What does it mean? Did the meaning of the title change as you wrote the book, or does it hold the same definition for you now as when you began?

Sarah Manguso: The guardians are the ones who outlived Harris—all of us who are still alive, managing the consequence of our survival.

I’ve been waiting to use The Guardians as a title since 2003, when I gave it to a book-length poem I never showed anyone. Then in about 2006 I started a research project about my orphaned Sicilian great-grandfather, hoping to use the same title, but the project went nowhere. Then in 2007 I thought I’d give the title to a novel, but that didn’t work, either. Then Harris died. I wrote the book. The title got used.

RUMPUS: I read a piece on grieving at Tablet Magazine shortly after Whitney Houston’s death that addressed the need people have to skip over what Judaism calls “aninut,” the period between first receiving the bad news (of someone’s death) and completing the funeral rites. Liebovitz writes, “Judaism understands that it takes us time to process the most unnatural fact of another human being having forever disappeared and therefore suggests that we focus only on the practical arrangements of burial and leave the emotional stuff for later, when we’ve had a chance to absorb the blow.” Did your grieving process affect your decision to write The Guardians?

Manguso: Belonging to a faith is comforting when someone dies—ritual calls one back to the world, if just barely. For twenty years and counting I’ve kept a diary, and it’s there that I first wrote about Harris’s death. I didn’t write much, though. This is all I wrote the day after I learned he’d disappeared (carriage returns indicate time passing):

7.25.08

Worried sick, can’t sleep. Terrible dreams. Adam is in bed, hungover from a tequila slushy.

Fear Harris is dead.

Harris is dead. His family positively identified a John Doe found in Riverdale.

His sister writes: sarah harris is dead. i am so sorry to tell you over email but i do not have your phone number.

Change is to was on his Wikipedia page, as he would have for me.

RUMPUS: You mention how reluctant you were, a mere three months after Harris’s funeral, to participate in a memorial concert some friends had prepared, saying “Everyone else could mourn, obedient, but I would not participate.” The struggle you mention, “raising the tiny irrational child of Harris’s death” seemed overwhelming at the time, forcing you to tend to the complicated feelings that come from losing someone so important. Do you recall a defining moment where this process became easier for you? Do you believe it ever really gets easier? Or perhaps the dynamic just changes for those who survive the deceased?

Manguso: I wasn’t ready to sing and feel the sweetness of Harris’s memory. Maybe no one else was, either. Eventually I could do those things, but I don’t believe in recovery. I believe in relentless forward momentum. One is never the same, but one must continue. In the book I write about a lucid dream in which I knew I was dreaming of Harris for the last time. That dream marked the beginning of the end of my grief.

RUMPUS: You bring up an interesting point about recovery and its connection to trauma. People live with death and disease, and when they’re ready to address life again, some slowly re-enter the world while acknowledging a great change. Was your reintegration after losing Harris different from the reintegration after your own illness?

Manguso: Well, my disease happened to me, and Harris’s death happened to Harris. And Harris’s death happened in an instant, but my disease relapses and remits—the experience is ongoing. And of course there’s been no moment in my illness that’s felt as final as the fact of Harris’s death.

RUMPUS: You wrote “I want to know about my particular grief, which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s,” explaining that other rituals, customs, and other grief processes don’t serve much purpose where your own healing’s concerned. I find it so interesting to examine the coping mechanisms we develop after a death. As a writer, how has your writing helped you learn about your own grief? What do you know now that you didn’t know at the beginning of this process? Or is it still a process?

Manguso: I don’t quite say that rituals don’t serve a purpose; I state that they can’t teach me anything about my grief. They’re mindless, automatic, the opposite of analysis or rumination. Harris’s death taught me merely that I’m capable of outliving him—and that I might live a long time, now that he’s so violently reduced the statistical likelihood of my own self-dispatch. But these things came to me only via writing (and rewriting).

RUMPUS: What becomes clear in The Guardians is your understanding of what it’s like to suffer from something you have no control over. Your book The Two Kinds of Decay discusses your autoimmune disorder, another situation that suspended your control. Can the lessons of one problem apply to other problems?

Manguso: Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.

RUMPUS: No one welcomes the addition of a physical or mental illness to their lives, yet you both had diseases to contend with at different points that dramatically affected your ability to live life. Do you feel like you understood Harris any better as a result of the common ground you shared?

Manguso: Sure, but I’m not the only person Harris told about his time in the hospital, and I’m not convinced we had a special understanding that trumped everyone else’s. No friend gets to claim the greatest intimacy. That’s one of the anxieties I write about.

RUMPUS: That’s a true and fair statement, to be sure. What’s one thing Harris knew about you that would have made him feel (even if temporarily) he truly did have the greatest intimacy with you?

Manguso: Ah, but if I told you, that intimacy would be gone…

RUMPUS: You mention various hypotheses in regard to Harris’s suicide. Because the reason remains unknown, you (and others) imagined a myriad reasons for the suicide. You discuss the agonizing side effects of antipsychotic drugs, mainly, akathisia, citing three disturbing examples of patients who reacted violently and/or committed suicide as a result. How helpful are drugs whose side effects create new monsters for patients to slay? How has your own medical treatment changed the way you think about prescription medication?

Manguso: It’s true that side effects create problems for patients, but side effects aren’t the root problem in the doctor-patient system—it’s capitalism. Companies obtain patents for drugs, and when the patents expire, they obtain new patents for revisions so minuscule, they’re essentially the same drugs. Meanwhile no one can manufacture a generic, so patients who can’t afford the name brand take shittier drugs with worse side effects, and they get sicker or die, and in the case of psychiatric drugs, the deaths are suicides. (NB: I don’t believe this is what happened to Harris.) While this is going on, the drug companies promote off-label uses in order to sell more pills without having to earn FDA approval. Then more patients get sick and die, and the companies buy gag orders and keep the remaining lawsuits tied up in court forever. This past week, AstraZeneca lost its U.S. patent for Seroquel, a drug I’ve taken for eight years. On the day the patent expired, the company appealed the judgment. They made more than five billion dollars last year just from this one drug. I’d take my business elsewhere, but I need the stuff. Without it I’m dead. It’s only a matter of time before the revolution comes, but that’s probably a subject for another interview.

RUMPUS: When things in life occur unexpectedly, it can take much longer to find peace in our hearts and minds. How do you feel about closure after an expected or timely death?

Manguso: My mother-in-law took years to die, but her death still undid me. A tiny box of her ashes sits behind my computer. The first time I looked in it I cried as if I’d discovered her body—which, of course, I had.

RUMPUS: The year you went to Italy, you and Harris stopped talking. You had your own struggles that year. Were you aware of Harris’ absence or did you feel his absence on a subconscious level?

Manguso: It was a year of great anxiety for me, as I detail in the book. I wasn’t myself, had disengaged from my actual life, and I felt his absence only after the fact—only after I realized I’d wasted his last year.

RUMPUS: In hindsight, is there anything about the year in Italy that you now recognize as having been positive, in spite of the distance from Harris, having missed his last year?

Manguso: Of course. For one thing, I ate better that year than I ever had, and I came to understand why some people care so much about eating well.

RUMPUS: After you marry, you tell your husband you want to see a psychic because you want to talk to Harris. You also mention that you feel his presence at times and entertain the idea of ghosts.  In the Kabbalah, there is a verb, davok, which means to cleave and, in 17th-century literature, it often refers to evil affecting the spirit and body. Dybbuk is shortened from the phrase dibbuk me ru’ah ra’ah, which roughly means to cleave or attach to outside spirits. Harris’s sister believes a dybbuk killed him. Do you believe in ghosts or possessed spirits? Do you think believing in them would make a difference in how you dealt with Harris’ death?

Manguso: I neither believe nor disbelieve that ghosts exist. I take it case by case. So far I’m still undecided. I’ve tried to believe in them, but I can’t.

RUMPUS: I’m interested in the idea of ghosts existing on a case-by-case basis. What keeps you from fully embracing the idea of them?

Manguso: Never seen one, and I’m an empiricist.

RUMPUS: How long did it take you to write this book?

Manguso: Well, I met Harris in 1994, then I wrote the title in 2003, and then the various iterations of the attached book appeared and disappeared. Harris died in 2008, and then I sold a draft of the book in 2010 but kept revising it until late 2011. I didn’t work on it every day, and the days I did work, I worked on it between one minute and ten hours. How long, indeed?

RUMPUS: I think writing about death or illness is always difficult. You’ve managed to do both (here and in your memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay). Did you worry about finding publishers for these books? What has that journey been like for you as a writer? 

Manguso: Writing about anything is difficult. Selling a book is also difficult, but in a different way. My so-called journey began years ago—my first book was published in 2002, and there were two more books before I found the agent who sold Decay, heaven bless him.

RUMPUS: Were you ever concerned about this book’s subject matter being an obstacle in regard to pitching or marketing the book? As a writer, you must think about what might excite your agent. Did the subject matter of the book give anyone pause?

Manguso: No, I know myself well enough that I don’t expect to produce a blockbuster. Despite this (and/or because of it), my agent’s belief in the inherent value of my work has lasted since the week we met, and my book editors have been just as supportive. I’m a lucky fool.

RUMPUS: Writers write the stories that need to be told. They aren’t always the ones that get bought, nor do writers control market trends. Earlier, you mentioned writing through problems as a means to understanding life and the struggles you’ve encountered. How do you feel that process is helping you evolve as a writer?

Manguso: Well, for one thing, my books keep getting longer.

RUMPUS: You recently moved back to New York from Los Angeles. You’re married now. You just published another book. These are all positive changes. If ghosts really do exist, what would want it to observe about your life?

Manguso: Enough that if the ghost ever spoke to me, I’d learn something.

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Gina Frangello is capable of magic. She’s the kind of person you meet and you know seconds after meeting them, they’re capable of things you’d never be able to accomplish. In Gina’s case, not only do you get this feeling when you meet her, but also when you’re lucky enough to sit down with one of her books and digest the absurd, the grotesque, the sexual, the hilarious, and the magical stories that lurk there. Frangello wears many hats: author, editor (Other Voices Books and Fiction Editor at The Nervous Breakdown), professor, mother, and wife.

Having first interviewed Gina after the release of her first novel, My Sister’s Continent, Rumpus writer Angela Stubbs caught up with her to discuss her latest release, Slut Lullabies, a collection of stories recently published by Emergency Press. They discussed sex, aging, therapy—and what it means to be Gina Frangello.

**

THE RUMPUS: Your second book is a collection of stories, Slut Lullabies. How did you decide to publish a collection after having published a novel?

GINA FRANGELLO: Well, I didn’t so much decide as that I had a streak of really shitty luck that ended up resulting in something good. I’d had a novel called London Calling in the queue for publication by Impetus Press, and while my novel was in production Impetus went bankrupt. Because this was just at the beginning of the publishing Armageddon that hit a few months later, my losing my publisher got a bit of media attention, which for a while was really depressing, like being a D-list celebrity going through a messy divorce.

But it turned out to be a good thing, in that some other indie publishers took an interest in the story, and a friend of mine, Cris Mazza, who had a book coming out with the New York- and Seattle- based indie, Emergency Press, was talking with her editor, Bryan Tomasovich, about it, and Bryan ended up approaching me and asking to see London Calling. For a bunch of red tape reasons, I wasn’t at liberty to give that book to anyone at the time, so instead I asked if he’d like to read a collection… About a week later, he offered to publish Slut Lullabies.

RUMPUS: You have the unique and fantastic ability to write about sex and awkward situations with grace, humor, and ease. Is this a chore, or is it somewhat effortless?

FRANGELLO: Um… do I look like an asshole if I claim it’s effortless? Look, there are many things in my writing that are indeed a struggle or a chore. I think what those things are vary from writer to writer. For me, writing sex—whether erotic or brutal or awkward—is not one of those things. It’s very organic and integral to, I guess, the fibers of what I write about. That’s been true from the time I first began writing.

RUMPUS: At what point did you begin picking stories to be a part of Slut Lullabies? These stories had all been previously published—how difficult was that task of looking at your stories and trying to decide what you’d include?

FRANGELLO: By the time I sent Slut Lullabies to Bryan, there was already a rough form of the manuscript. My former literary agent, Bill Clegg, had helped me compile it when he was shopping my first novel, My Sister’s Continent. Bill had read pretty much all my published stories and suggested which ones I should include and in which order. Our basic logic at that time was that none of the stories that featured the same characters who appeared in My Sister’s Continent would be in my collection—we wanted the collection to have an entirely separate feel, not to be derivative… so that took a lot of pieces off the table right there and simplified things.

I did add a couple of newer pieces and I changed around the story order, because Bryan and I had our own opinions about that, given we’re both editors, and story placement is really important to both of us—that balance changes every time you add a new piece to a book.

RUMPUS: Speaking of My Sister’s Continent, which is a fantastic retelling of Freud’s “Dora” case study through the dysfunctional lives of two contemporary twin sisters: As a former therapist, do you ever find yourself thinking about using info from old sessions of former clients in your fiction?

FRANGELLO: I’m deeply inspired by my years as a therapist. I met girls and women during those four years who had been through things that were on the level of what you might live through in a war zone… I encountered a lot of abuse that was not just ugly and oppressive in a way that is sadly all too common, but things that were truly bizarre in their brutality.

The most extreme of those things are not the circumstances I write about. There are two basic reasons: one is that the insanity of those situations were so specific that it would be hard to write about most of it without literally stealing someone’s life and breaking confidentiality. The other is that some of these circumstances were so over-the-top that I’m not sure I could tackle them in literature without it seeming sensationalized and cheapening the truth rather than honoring or deepening it.

But in general, the women and girls I worked with in New Hampshire and Vermont in the early 1990s had come from extremely abusive—physical and sexual, usually both—backgrounds and most of the women currently lived in abusive situations, perpetuating the cycle either out of fear for their lives if they left, or out of simply not believing they truly had other choices or options. The foster girls had been taken from their homes, almost invariably because their mothers refused to believe their stories or to leave the men who were hurting [their daughters] even when they witnessed it with their own eyes. So in addition to the most horrific abuses at the hands of men they had also suffered a profound rejection from their mothers.

Those years and that work informed me a great deal about the powerful survival instinct many people possess, but also about the ways some demons are never fully overcome, and how the past lives with us every day in a very present way. The Rumpus’ amazing “Dear Sugar” column once featured a post about what it is to do this kind of work—how it impacts you and what you learn about both the world and the human spirit, and especially how it is essential to redefine what might constitute a “successful” outcome for someone who has, for all intents and purposes, lived through a war in which there were no limits or rules. Sugar expressed what I feel about all that more eloquently than I could say it here. But those girls are always with me when I write. Though most of them will no doubt never read any of my work, it would not be untrue to say that I write for them.

RUMPUS: Your subject matter and characters are extremely varied and diverse. Is there a place you feel you have yet to go or yet to write about in your fiction?

FRANGELLO: I have written very little from the perspective of characters who are parents. In Slut Lullabies only one of the stories’ protagonists—Victoria in “The Marie Antoinette School of Economics”—is a parent. Most of the main characters in my published work have been in their twenties—sometimes teens or early thirties—and not yet in that stage of life. I tend, for whatever reason, to focus on characters 5-10 years behind me, age- and lifestyle-wise. I definitely feel like the Next Big Frontier of my writing is to incorporate parenthood and middle age into my characters’ lives. I do not mean in a Mommy Lit kind of way—I mean in the way that people’s lives remain complicated, political, sexual, intense and story-worthy even if they are out of their early thirties and are parenting children. The big surprise of aging is that it does not actually make people less interesting if they were interesting to begin with, but rather makes them more so—or it certainly should if done right.

RUMPUS: You’re an editor for Other Voices Books and a fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. What’s the most challenging part about each of those jobs?

FRANGELLO: In the general sense, the most challenging part of having any job other than writing is that other work takes time away from writing. I have three kids, age ten and under, so I feel this very acutely because my demands on the home front are also considerable. I tend to take on far too much, to the point of it being something of a joke among people who know me. It’s a little absurd. I even take on things I have no particular skills at doing, such as uploading material to The Nervous Breakdown, which necessitates coding and such—I’m a tech idiot and I’m still worried on basically a daily basis that I’m going to somehow contribute to the utter crash of the entire Nervous Breakdown someday with a technical blunder.

RUMPUS: Your agent just called. You’re afraid she’s going to tell you… what?

FRANGELLO: Well, my agent, Ellen Levine, is pretty heroic and supportive. I’ve been working with her for five years and—since both of my books have come out from indie presses—have yet to really make her any money, but she’s remained incredibly loyal and invested in my work. That said, I suppose every time I talk to her I’m afraid she’s going to tell me that if I don’t revise my current novel in a way that makes it more “commercial” or able to be marketed more with that “popular women’s fiction” angle, then there’s nothing more she can do for me.

I’m not sure this is a realistic fear—I mean, she represents Michael Ondaatje and other highly literary, even experimental writers who have found success without making artistic compromises. But this market right now… it’s bad. New York publishing is in a scary place right now. I think your last advance has to have been pretty big for you not to be at least a little bit afraid that your agent could break up with you at any moment.

RUMPUS: What comes next for you? What are you writing now?

FRANGELLO: Right now Ellen is waiting on my newest novel, A Life in Men, about a woman traveler with cystic fibrosis. The novel is framed between the [1988] Lockerbie Disaster, and September 11. Every chapter takes place in a different country. I’m obsessed with this novel, so it makes me kind of sick to my stomach to take it out into the world. It’s like sending a child off to military school or something…

Meanwhile, I’m also writing some short fiction for the first time in years. I just wrote a short story that may be my favorite of any I’ve written, though probably I always feel that way at the time. There are writers who hate everything they write, even if it’s brilliant, but I tend to fall far too deeply in love with my characters to be that sensible and self-protective; when it comes to my characters… well, I guess I’m a slut.

RUMPUS: You recently said in a “self-interview” at TNB that you are “particularly interested in the way people are ‘othered’ by their sexuality in a variety of ways… and in the end I’m probably more fascinated by exploring the way my characters alienate themselves, and why, than with what other people may do to them externally.” You write so incredibly well when it comes to human issues regarding sexuality. My Sister’s Continent explored those issues in part from a lesbian perspective, and here in Slut Lullabies, one story features a gay Latino who’s dealing with marriage issues. How do you get inside characters so different from you or your own life?

FRANGELLO: My husband’s cousin recently asked me a variation of this same question. Basically, she said, “How do you experience so many different emotions? Do you have Multiple Personality Disorder?” She was kidding, of course. But maybe it’s true that identity is a little permeable to writers. I think most of us experience—at least in our own minds—a kind of empathy-telepathy where it’s always been extremely easy for us to think we know what the other person is thinking or feeling in any given situation. We feel a little like mind readers. I don’t mean this in any mystical way—I am not a mystical or spiritual person, for better or worse—I just mean in terms of insight.

Good therapists, bartenders, medical doctors, educators, and salespeople can often possess this same talent. And sex workers! It’s a talent that’s very inborn, and extremely unrelated to whether or not you will make a lot of money or anything, but I think most fiction writers with any modicum of talent possess this trait, often to degrees that it can be intrusive in our daily lives—that we take on other people’s emotions or put ourselves in the shoes of others so compulsively that the only way to satisfy that urge is to write.

But I think this question also gets to the heart of how we define “difference.” And certainly somebody being gay or having darker skin is not how I fundamentally quantify how different I feel from them. This isn’t to undermine cultural differences, or the fact that some people face discrimination that I don’t have to deal with as a white, married woman—I’m just saying those things aren’t what makes somebody seem foreign to me internally. I grew up in a largely Latino neighborhood in Chicago, and went to a high school with 6,000 people in it of all different races and from all over the city, and I’ve lived in a few different countries, so—like a lot of urban people of my generation or younger—multiculturalism is not “exotic” to me, it’s just a fact of life. I also grew up below the poverty line, but I’ve had close friends who are wealthy and I now lead a pretty solid middle-to-upper-middle-class existence, so class-hopping is of a lot of interest to me and something I feel a fair amount of facility with.

It’s funny: When I was a kid, the Italians in my neighborhood didn’t consider ourselves white—we referred to “white people” meaning the wealthy, the WASPs, just like our Latino neighbors did… I had to get quite a bit older before I realized how deeply white privilege actually did apply to me. But my daughters aren’t white: they’re Chinese. They were adopted from China, and a lot of their peers—the kids of my friends—don’t have “traditional” birth stories either. Our best friends are a gay couple with two babies by a surrogate, and one of our closest women friends is a single, Jewish mom who just adopted from Ethiopia. So my dad and my daughters and a lot of our friends are either first generation Americans or moved here as kids. In this way, the kinds of difference that I tackle in my fiction—that’s very much the stuff of my real life, even if it’s not always about a character who would identify with the same labels that would be applied to me personally. Difference is much more about who you feel you can empathize with, who you think you can believe, than it is about what somebody looks like or who they sleep with.

RUMPUS: You recently wrote a three-part essay about your father turning 88. Have you ever thought about turning those essays into something bigger?

FRANGELLO: I have an entire novel written about my old neighborhood. It’s fiction, but very autobiographical in a lot of ways, and covers some of the same kind of material from those essays. Right now the novel, which is called A Beautiful Violence, is on my desktop and not being revised or submitted or anything, because of that very reason. I’ve come to realize that I probably have a nonfiction book in me about all that, and the novel was just practice for it. I’m not sure when I’ll ever write a larger work of nonfiction, but I think it’s something that’s building. It’s interesting the way learning to recognize what material is simply mine—not about making up a story to surround it or turn it into something else—is something I’m only now really discovering, past the age of forty. I always believed fictionalizing things would make them more interesting, free them up to tell larger truths, and sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s just the opposite, and the real story—or my version of it, I mean—has everything it needs already, and is just waiting for its writer to find the courage to tell it.

RUMPUS: Tell me why it’s good to be Gina Frangello.

FRANGELLO: Oh, man, Ang. I mean, just look at this. Need I say more?

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On the surface, Christian Peet’s Big American Trip looks like a simple collection of postcards from a nondescript (“alien”) narrator on a journey across the United States. Here, the founder of Tarpaulin Sky Press and author of The Nines takes language and puts it under his microscope; whether it’s written on bathroom walls, the backs of postcards, or billboards, Peet examines how our knowledge of language affects each of us. Peet is no novice when it comes to communication, and his experience at deciphering what makes good fiction and publishing it Tarpaulin Sky’s journal and books leads into his interpretation of fictional narratives in this cross-country trip.

Inside this clever collection, postcards slowly reveal their true and unique messages. The gender, ethnicity and age of each sender is unknown, the postcards’ recipients range far and wide, and Peet casts an inclusive net with these poetic public addresses. Big American Trip addresses all of our insecurities as artists, as lovers, and as citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak. Peet allows us to look closely at our limits as humans and as Americans in a world filled seemingly with so many opportunities to connect.

Christian Peet

Peet’s writing is less about plot than about experimentation with text and style. That’s not to say Big American Trip is void of message or story—quite the contrary. The words that decorate the various postcards are provocative and alluring, the text playing with form and genre in unique ways. The “foreigner” narrator seeks common ground with all walks of life, in cities and towns across America. Peet places intricate stories and pieces of landscape next to one another, allowing the reader to perceive how these are magnetically drawn to one another.

Big American Trip speaks to the American dream and what holds it together, and Peet examines how difficult it can be to define what it means to be an American—there’s a certain Norman Rockwell quality to both the writing of postcards and the images on the cards themselves. Peet’s ambiguous “alien” addresses these descriptive, poetic mini-manifestoes to politicians, oil companies, and corporate officers, just to name a few. A kind of battle ensues between the hopefulness of the words (or lack thereof), and the negative associations their readers will have with the arrogance and misplaced power of recent current events.

Geographical borders are equal to language barriers, as we see while following our narrator from coast to coast in search of common denominators (shared passions, aspirations, security, adventure). We never quite figure out what this narrator is looking for, but aimlessness itself becomes the common thread that holds this story together. In the end, it’s not what is found on the journey but what remains missing that holds our interest: “It is not simply a matter of language…/it is possible to translate with fair accuracy from one language to another/without losing too much of the original/meaning. But there are not methods/by which we can translate a mentality/and its alien ideas.”

What’s most captivating about Big American Trip is Peet’s attention to the qualities we share, regardless of geographical and linguistic barriers. This unique book opens eyes and minds to both difference and sameness in an ever-evolving world.

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