by Deborah WillisPenguin Canada
~ Review in Halifax Herald, November 2009
The stories in this debut collection are about love. Not just romantic love, but the deep caring between friends, brothers and sisters, parents and children. They are about our inability to do much more than stand by helplessly as we are buffeted and cracked open by its force.
In the title story, Vanishing, Tabitha’s playwright father stacks his unpublished manuscripts neatly, climbs down from his attic study, walks out the door and never comes home. Tabitha “imagines that her father stepped onto a bus, then onto a boat and soon they’ll receive a postcard from India.” She never stops waiting.
Three friends live together in This Other Us, believing they were happy, until one of them leaves. “I had prepared myself for something bad to happen, because I’m the kind of person who thinks ahead” says Elise. She and Lawrence turn to each other for comfort
How does a child survive the loss of a parent, or begin to understand the complexities of adulthood which seem out of control? A mother drives fast as she “blasted down wide roads, past subdivisions” with her retired boxer lover. A med student daughter stops eating, looking “like a pile of bent hangars” under a blanket. Willis’s characters react as we react. She paints them with care, they are real. They gamble, use sex or dope, pick up younger lovers. Willis gives them permission to find their way, however contorted.
Remember, Relive gives us Cassy as her almost brother-in-law seduces her on his wedding day. She is thirteen. Her mother slowly drifts toward dementia; her father is 10 years dead. “Memories of him are like the photographs: grainy, flat, not really alive to you ever.”
Vanishing is a thoughtful, entertaining debut collection. And now she has written her first book, one hopes that another is not too far away.
Deborah Willis grew up in Calgary. Her fiction has been published in Canadian literary magazines, and in the UK’s Bridport Prize Anthology. She lives in Victoria, BC.
