Silence That Kills

I seem to be reading a lot of books in which the consequences of silence are repercussive.

There are spoilers beyond this point! Be warned and proceed with caution.

I received a pre-release copy of The Cure for Grief by Nellie Hermann. This novel is about a young girl, Ruby Bronstein, who is dealing with an incredible amount of pain. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, has blocked his memories of his experience and, shortly after a trip to the concentration camp where he was imprisoned, he is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. This happens after her oldest brother has a breakdown and eventually is institutionalized because he is schizophrenic. And as if this were not enough, her favorite brother comes home from college only to be diagnosed with the same form of cancer that had killed her father.

And nobody in the family talks about any of it. Everything is okay. Everyone is fine. Ruby, however, with her silent witness is aware that things are not only not okay but they are getting worse and if someone doesn’t do something none of them will ever be truly fine again. At the novel’s inevitable climax, Ruby snaps at her third and only healthy brother and her mother, screaming the truths she has been holding buried. Although the novel doesn’t carry the story much further than beyond this point, it is enough to know that the healing Ruby needs lay in her ability to finally say what she knew to be true and that the amount of pain they were all carrying would kill them if they did not honor the pain by at least being honest with one another.

A friend and I had agreed to read Quakeland by Francesca Lia Block along with me and in doing so mentioned she had once read a book by her. Which is why I reread I Was a Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block to sort of remind myself of the story. I thought that by rereading this book I would give us both a reference point by which to compare and contrast the more recent publication.

I Was a Teenage Fairy is about pedophilia as experienced and witnessed through the eyes of Barbie Marks, a child whose mother is trying to live her modeling dreams through her only daughter. When Barbie is sexually molested, she says nothing until five years later when, during a photo shoot with the same photographer who had molested her as a child triggers a response. She exposes him as a pedophile and confronts her mother. By doing so Barbie is freed to live her own dreams, leaving modeling behind, moving out of her mother’s home and making a life for herself.

From my own experience, my silence nearly destroyed my family. I learned how to speak by writing. Journaling to myself was a dangerous act in a home where my husband did not understand boundaries. Nevertheless, I kept writing, hiding in poetry what I was most afraid of writing.

Silence maintained the status quo. The status quo was killing me. Eventually, what I wrote on the page had saturated me to the point where I had to say something. When I started to speak out it was dangerous because it threatened to tear my home, and my family, apart.

I did and it did and, when the dust settled, I put the home and family back together without my husband. It was inevitable.