Learning to Grieve: Linda Holmes' EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER

How many times have you looked at a happily married couple and thought, "wow, how perfect are those two for one another?"

And how many times has that image of perfection been at all close to the truth?

To everyone in her small (very white) Maine hometown, Evvie Drake seems to be living a perfect fairy tale. She and her high school sweetheart, Tim, attended college together, maintained a long-distance relationship during his medical residency, then married and moved back to Calcasset, even though they could have run off to the big city as so many other young Down Easters had done. Tim was "effortlessly charming" to everyone he met, and served his small community with pride and care, and the house he bought for his wife was far more luxurious than the small cottage in which she grew up. Even Evvie's hardworking lobsterman father thinks "my Eveleth is so lucky, that Tim wants to be her husband" (Kindle Loc 1152). For ordinary Evvie to have caught good doctor Tim seems luckier than hauling in the season's largest catch of lobsters.

Which is why when Tim dies in a car crash, everyone in town understands Evvie's debilitating grief.

Everyone, that is, except Evie.

Because nobody besides Evvie knows that when she got the call from the hospital a year earlier, telling her that her husband had been in an accident, she'd been just about to leave: leave Calcasset, leave her marriage, and above all, leave her too perfect to be real husband. The third person narrator doesn't tell the reader why Evvie was poised for flight; everyone else in town, including Evvie's own family, thinks Tim was the perfect doctor, the perfect husband, the perfect small town guy. This disconnect between her own far less rosy memories of her marriage and those of everyone else around her, and her need to keep her aborted flight from town a secret so she won't be accused of heartlessness toward the dead and departed Tim, has Evvie just as stuck—in Calcasset, in the house that she hates—as if she had really been grieving for a beloved spouse. As the narrator explains at the start of the story,

It had been almost a year since Tim died, and she still couldn't do anything at all sometimes, because she was so consumed by not missing him. She could fill up whole rooms with how it felt to be the only person who knew that she barely loved him when she'd listened to him snoring lightly on the last night he was alive. Monster, monster, she thought. Monster, monster. (Kindle Loc 137)

Her best friend, Andy, worried that Evvie is spending too much time by herself ("You know...it's not good to be alone too much. It'll make you weird" [232]) persuades her to rent out the small apartment attached to her house to his old college buddy, Dean, who wants to get away for a few months from his life of notoriety in New York City. A former World Series-winning pitcher for the Yankees, Dean's case of the "yips" (an inexplicable loss of fine motor skills in a mature athlete; in baseball, the ability to accurately throw the ball) has become so disastrously embarrassing that he's been voted "First Athlete We'd Throw into an Active Volcano" by the fans on a popular sports website. Tired of the taunts and interviews and endless analysis, Dean decides to officially retire, and needs a quiet place where he can take it easy for a while while he figures out what to do with the rest of his life. Since Andy presumes that Evvie is doing the same, he guesses that they'll have a lot in common.

At first, Evvie is reluctant, but she changes her mind when it turns out that Dean is as wary of talking about baseball as Evvie is about talking of her widowhood:

     "I do think we should have a deal." She looked at him expectantly. "You don't ask me aboput baseball," he said, "and I don't ask you about your husband."
     She blinked. "I didn't ask you about baseball."
     "I know. I didn't ask you about your husband."
     "But you want to have an official arrangement."
     He rubbed his eyes. "I don't know how much you know about it, Evvie, but I have had a shitty year. A shitty couple of years. And I have talked about it a lot. And I think maybe you're in the same position. If you're okay with this, you'd be doing me a favor, and you'd be doing me an even bigger favor if it can just be normal. I'll say hi, and you can say hi, and we won't do, you know, the whole thing with the mysterious sad lady and the exiled... fuckup." (454)

After Dean moves in, he and Evvie keep things pleasant, chatting amiably about books and television and small towns versus big cities, light, funny conversations that steer well clear of baseball and grief. But Evvie watches as Dean as he throws pine cones in the pitch-dark of the Maine evenings, and wonders if he has truly given up his dream of throwing again in the majors. And Dean listens when Evie "punch[es] a little hole in the rowboat in which they'd decided to float" by telling him about the memorial service she's attended for her husband, and perceptively asks why she doesn't include herself in the list of people for whom the "memorial thing" was great (745). And hears the confession that tumbles out of Evvie's mouth:

"I felt bad," she said, "because they all loved him so much, and I didn't. I mean, I loved him originally, a lot, but I didn't when he died. He wasn't nice to me. He didn't hit me or anything, but he was sometimes pretty nasty. And then he died, and now when I'm around people who miss him, I don't know what to do. Sometimes I can't sleep because I don't miss him so much, which sounds crazy. But...that. (755)

After a few more rounds of punching holes in the rowboat of their non-discussion agreement, Dean proposes that they call the agreement off, and choose to be friends instead. And after that, attraction begins to leak through the gaping rowboat hole. But when Evvie's penchant for making everybody happy all the time runs smack into Dean's tiny but still not entirely extinguished desire to pitch again, will nurturing hopes once set aside lead to a new start? Or only to a dead end?

Evvie's struggles are all behind the scenes, hidden from her family and fellow townspeople, and often even from herself. Dean's, in contrast, are everything public, appallingly visible to millions who shiver with the horrified glee of schadenfreude at the once elite athlete who now throws even worse than they do. But both are struggling with how to grieve: for a dead husband Evvie no longer loves; for a career Dean still does; and most importantly, for the selves each worked so hard to construct in each of those roles: cheerful, uncomplaining wife; dominating never-fail star pitcher. Even if those constructions did and continue to do each of them more harm than good.

With its slowly-developing romance, and its focus on the many ways that both Evvie and Dean need to learn to "start over," Holmes' story is closer to women's fiction than it is to full-blown romance. And its storylines do not all end in the easy triumph common to genre romance. But with its sensitively-constructed characters, amusing and clever dialogue, and all too believable depiction of one woman's gradual understanding and acceptance of how she was once gaslighted and emotionally abused, Evvie Drake Starts Over might just be the most quietly charming work of feminist romantic fiction I've read this year.


Photo credits:
Breaking the Yips cycle: Peak Performance Sports

Linda Holmes

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Ballantine Books, 2019

The Thinks and the Feels: Kennedy Ryan's LONG SHOT

(Content Warning: discussion of domestic violence and rape)

On the eve of the NCAA basketball National Championship, star college baller August West is sitting in a bar, reluctant to return to his hotel room. It's not only the eve of his biggest game ever; it's also the eve of the birth of his father, a former NBA player who died fifteen years earlier, and he's restless and jittery. But after his high school coach, whom he was supposed to be meeting, has an unexpected emergency, West reconciles himself to an early evening.

Until he hears the young woman cussing like a sailor at the basketball game on the television at the other end of the bar.

Said woman's knowledge of basketball is almost as impressive as her colorful language, and West feels an immediate connection. Not because she plays up to him—in fact, she's initially pretty dismissive—but because he discovers that she, like he, is biracial. When he asks her where's she's from, the woman explains about her New Orleans Creole stock on her mother's side, and her German and Irish on father's: "I'm a mix of everything the bayou could come up with... So my cousin says I had more ingredients than gumbo," (Kindle Loc 231). Though West's mother is the white parent, his father the black, West and "Gumbo" share the same experience of feeling like a racial outsider. "Did you ever feel like you didn't quite fit anywhere? I mean, like you were always kind of in between?" Gumbo asks him, which causes West to think "I may not look a lot like my African-American father, but I look nothing like anyone in the family I have left. Most kids were one thing or the other and clumped together based on that. It left me sometimes feeling adrift" (245).

West and Gumbo (her actual name is Iris) get so caught up in their conversation that they end up shutting down the bar. But when West goes in for a kiss at the end of the night, Iris call a halt. To West's everlasting regret, she's already got a boyfriend.

After this opening meet-bittersweet, a reader is expecting that the aforementioned boyfriend is not long for Iris's arms. And that the resultant romance will focus on two people connecting over their mutual biracial identities and experiences.

But said reader would be mistaken. For Ryan's story is less traditional romance and more women's fiction, a journey that the author hints at in the Author's Note that prefaces the novel:

I started writing this book two years ago out of righteous indignation on behalf of a young woman whose journey I didn't understand. I write when I have something to say, and I knew I couldn't say it from a place of judgment and hypotheticals. So I started talking with women who had walked that path.

Ryan writes in abstractions here, but one can't really write a review of her novel without being more specific. For the "path" that she refers to is the path into and out of an abusive romantic relationship. The "place of judgment" Ryan mentions is likely the judgment that many who have not experienced such a relationship first-hand tend to make about not the abuser, but the person being abused. Why didn't they leave? Why did they take it when the verbal abuse started pouring out of a love one's mouth? Why did they stay when the fists started flying? They just must be weak, or must want to be abused, right?

But the Iris we meet along with August is not weak in the least. As August observes, "A lot of girls just reflect. They figure out what you like so they can get in with a baller. This one has her own views, stands her own ground and doesn't five a damn if I like it. I like it" (224). And when we get inside Iris's head, we discover that her main goal in life is to not end up relying on a man, as her mother has for most of her life. She and her cousin have "always been afraid of ending up like our mothers—depending on a man for everything, taking his scraps" (908).

Iris DuPree's relationship with Caleb Bradley isn't about taking his scraps—at least at first. Despite being an economically privileged white college boy, Caleb spent time and effort to woo the reluctant Iris, and they've been dating for almost a year. But readers with any knowledge of how abusers operate is likely to pick up on the clues Ryan drops that Caleb is not as great a guy as he seems. He prefers Iris to wear her hair a certain way, gives her clothes that he wants her to wear, and is prone to angry outbursts on the basketball court when things don't go his way. And he's definitely not excited about Iris's post-college career plans, plans that will likely take her away from him.

Entitled Caleb proves to be a master manipulator, and Iris, despite her reservations, ends up living with her boyfriend soon after Caleb enters the NBA. And since West has also been drafted, Iris and West's paths end up crossing and recrossing, brief conversations with West serving as welcome respite for Iris from an increasingly tension-filled relationship with Caleb.

A relationship that, by the end of Caleb's first professional season, turns verbally and physically abusive. But a relationship that Iris can't find her way out of, at least at first. Ryan does not shy away from depicting the violence that Iris experiences at Caleb's hands; there are multiple scenes of both assault and rape on the page. Such depictions are likely to be deeply triggering for many readers. And for readers who are immersed in rape culture (as are we all), it can be difficult to read such scenes as solely violent when rape has so often been presented as an erotic experience in popular culture. Not at all what the author intended, I'd guess, but still, hard to escape.

Why then did Ryan choose to include such scenes? What purpose do they serve? Is is possible to tell the story of domestic abuse without showing on the page the violence that lies at its heart? Is it empowering or disempowering for those who have been abused to see similar abuse depicted directly, rawly, without a veil? What about for those who have not experienced such abuse themselves? Does seeing such violence depicted on the page make those who haven't been victims more sympathetic toward those who have? I don't think there are any easy "yes" or "no" answers to such questions; each reader will have to decide for themselves whether to pick up Ryan's book knowing that such scenes are included.

What I can say is that I wholeheartedly applaud Ryan's inversion of the racist image of the white woman endangered by overly sexualized black man, an image that has played out over and over in American popular culture since the end of the Civil War (see D. W. Griffiths' 1917 film Birth of a Nation for just one example; see Martha Hodes' White Women, Black Men for a historical corrective). While the majority of sexual assaults in the United States today are intra-racial (victim and perpetrator are of the same race), we cannot say the same about the past; Americans tend to repress and erase the long history of white male rape of enslaved black women during our country's long embrace of slavery. Ryan's choice to make her domestic abuser a white man serves as a pointed reminder of this often forgotten history.

ARREST RATES ACROSS PRO SPORTS TEAMS

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Through Iris, Ryan also makes pointed comments about the way our current society continues to look away from the violence perpetrated by men against women, especially when those men are in positions of power (professional athletes, rather than plantation owners) and the women they abuse are women of color. Once Iris figures out a way to free herself and her daughter from Caleb, she doesn't choose to press charges against him:

"Other athletes outed as abusers are fined and miss a few games, only to be back on the court, back on the field in a few weeks. I'm not trusting my life, my daughter's life, to a system that favors men just like Caleb. I've seen the so-called consequences we have for domestic abuse, and I need more than that."

What she needs is a guy like West, who throughout the story serves as a vision of hope for what a future with a kind, caring man might be like. But Iris never asks West to rescue her; in fact, she turns to her cousin, and to her great grandmother, not to her potential good guy lover, to help her recover emotionally in the wake of her trauma. West may be the idealized prize at the end of the struggle, but the hard work of recovery is one best undertaken with sympathetic female supporters, Ryan suggests.


Ryan is adept at giving readers the "big feels," a vital skill for any romance writer (see West's swoon-worthy declaration to Iris: "If you were mine, Iris, there would be no doubt what position you'd hold in my life. You'd be center. I'd play you at the five."). But she's also just as good at getting readers to think hard about the big issues, issues that American culture would often prefer we ignore: domestic violence; racial identity; the gendered aspects of privileged and power. It's this combination—big emotions and big ideas—that make Ryan one of the most provocative authors writing romance today.


Photo credits:
Basketball bar: DHGate
Pro sports arrest rates: Vocativ

Kennedy Ryan

Long Shot

A Hoops Novel (#1)

indie-published, 2018