The Tender Land

Kathleen Finneran

Description

An extraordinary memoir of a family haunted by tragedy: “I’ve read very few contemporary novels that can rival Finneran’s nonfiction.” —Jonathan Franzen
 A superb portrait of family life, this “absorbing and thoughtful” memoir is a love story unlike any other (Library Journal). The Finnerans—Irish Catholic parents with five children in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family whose lives are upended by a catastrophic event: the suicide of the author’s fifteen-year-old younger brother after being publicly humiliated in junior high school.
 
A gentle, handsome boy, Sean Finneran was a straight-A student and gifted athlete, especially treasured by every member of his family. Masterfully, the book interweaves past and present, showing how inseparable the Finnerans are, and how the long accumulation of love and memory helps them survive their terrible loss.
 
“Unforgettable in its restraint and quiet beauty,” The Tender Land is a testament to the always-complicated ways in which we love one another (Publishers Weekly). In quietly luminous language, Kathleen Finneran renders the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family life—its closeness and disconnection, its intimacy and estrangement—and pays tribute to the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters. In doing so, she “reminds us of how complicated, unique, and fragile an organism the family is” (The Boston Globe).
 
“[Great writers] change us. Kathleen Finneran fits in this niche. . . . Her prose sings.” —USA Today
 
“Beautifully written . . . Like life itself, this memoir evokes both sadness and joy.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 

Sujets

• Catholicisme
• Lettres et linguistique
• Youth suicide
• Verbal abuse
• Bullies
• Psychological trauma
• Sibling
• Healing
• Self-harm
• Posttraumatic stress disorder
• Mental disorder
• Grief
• Bullying
• Suicide

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780547349282
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
The Evidence of Angels
Two Summers
New Year’s Day, 1990
As My Father Retires
Acts of Faith and Other Matters
The Tender Land
About the Author
First Mariner Books edition 2003

Copyright © 2000 by Kathleen Finneran
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Finneran, Kathleen. The tender land : a family love story / Kathleen Finneran. p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-98495-5
1. Suicide victims—Family relationships. 2. Teenagers —Suicidal behavior. I. Title. HV 6546. F 53 2000 362.28’3’092—dc21 [B] 99-089868

eISBN 978-0-547-34928-2 v2.1017
For my mother and father, in whose lives I see the evidence of faith and love and labor
And for Sean

Set me as a seal upon your heart, for love is stronger than death.
— from the Song of Songs
Acknowledgments
In writing this book, I was fortunate to receive assistance and encouragement from many people. I am grateful to David Gould and Kathryn Haslanger (who has guided and inspired me with her intelligence, goodness, and grace), of the United Hospital Fund, for allowing me a leave of absence so early in my employment and for their continued kindness and support; the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and Cottages at Hedgebrook for the space and time to write in such beautiful surroundings; Jan Figueira for her perpetual optimism and good cheer; Alene Hokenstad for her clear and compassionate thinking; Patricia McEntee for being helpful with the book’s beginning; Wendy Surinsky for her honesty and enthusiasm and for the passion she has for her own work and for the work of those whom she admires; Julie Eakin for her ardent and intelligent reading of the book, in its many incarnations, and for the continuing dialogue she carries on with me about it; Laura Popenoe for reading and scrutinizing the manuscript with such care; Anne Barasch and Marlene Eskin for always asking to read more; Pat Dick for her early influence and sustained interest; Georgia Binnington for providing much-needed affirmation; Douglas Gaubatz for helping me to learn, through the example of his life and his work, how to look at things, and for teaching me that the adventure lies within the routine; Janis Irene Roddy for all that she has contributed in life and in friendship and in art; and Karin Cook for making me be more honest than I might have been and for sharing precious days that inspired the book’s title piece.
I regret not being able to thank in person the two teachers who most influenced my writing. They are the late Sondra Stang, whose regard made me want to write well and whose support was instrumental in the publication of this book, and the late Stanley Elkin, who provided me with the recommendations I needed to advance from one place to the next, and whose work I looked to for instruction and inspiration.
I am deeply grateful to Anne Edelstein, my agent, whose presence in my life—personally and professionally—is one of the best things to have happened to me as a consequence of my writing this book; and to Elaine Pfefferblit, my editor, who saw some potential in the few pages I sent to her, waited patiently while I wrote the rest, and gave to the book, and to me, her unparalleled attention, intelligence, loyalty, wisdom, skill, and good counsel.
I thank my parents, Thomas and Lois Finneran, my brother, Michael Finneran, and my sisters, Mary Elder and Kelly Sonntag, for trusting me with the material of our lives and for always taking an interest in what I write. For enlarging our family and adding new life to it, I thank my sister-in-law, Sauni Van Pelt Finneran, and my brothers-in-law, Dan Elder and Duane Sonntag, and I thank, with the greatest love and delight, my nieces and nephews, Sarah, Jesse, and Allison Elder, and Stephanie and Nicholas Sonntag.
I thank, cherish, and am forever altered by the person most responsible for my having written this book—my brother Sean Patrick Finneran—and regret that he did not realize the joy of living longer.
Most especially, and most affectionately, I thank Roberta Swann—in whom my good fortune has its origins—for reading and refining what I wrote and for giving me the friendship I needed to begin this book and to finish it.
The Evidence of Angels
To those who have seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
—W.H. Auden


My mother believes she gave birth to an angel. She told me so when I stopped by one day for lunch, and though we have never discussed it, I imagine she told Michael, Mary, and Kelly just as matter-of-factly. “I think there was a reason he was only here for a short time,” she said. “I think he was an angel sent to save someone.”
My father was sitting across from me at the kitchen table. From merely looking at his face, I can usually tell exactly what he is thinking, especially if anything has been said that either of us might consider questionable. He has communicated silently with me since I was a child, staring at me from across a room or in the rearview mirror of the car until I look up to see what he wants to tell me. It is an unspoken language of astonishment, criticism, and condemnation. It has always kept us close.
The first time my father communicated with me this way I was five. He had picked me up from kindergarten. Usually my mother picked me up, but it was a beautiful fall day, and even though he was still in the construction business, and good weather was a commodity, my father was splendidly carefree sometimes, coming home early and taking us on long drives to undisclosed destinations, special places he wanted to show us. But before we could go to wherever we were going that day, we had to drop off a boy in my class. His mother drove us to school and mine drove us home. When he saw that my father had come instead, the boy ran for the front seat, where I usually sat, so I climbed in back and sat behind my father. As he started the car, my father looked at me in the rearview mirror as if to say he recognized what the boy had done, usurping the seat that should have been mine. When we got to his house, the boy told my father to pull all the way up to the top of the driveway, as close to the front door as he could. “Closer. A little closer,” the boy said. It was something my mother did every day without direction, the boy having instructed her the first time we took him home. He hated to walk any farther than he had to. Now the boy sat up high in the front seat to see out past the hood of the car, saying, “Just a few more feet.” My father looked at me in the rearview mirror again. “Here is a real baby,” his eyes said. I felt privileged then, and I didn’t fight for the front seat later that day, as I usually did when we picked up Michael and Mary from North American Martyrs, the school I would go to the following year when I started first grade. Instead, I stayed in the back to watch in the rearview mirror for anything else my father might want to tell me.
It was almost twenty years later, and many words had passed unspoken between us by the time my mother revealed her belief that my younger brother, Sean, was an angel. It was a few weeks after Sean’s death, and she spoke with such certainty and composure that I longed for my father to look at me and let me know what he was thinking. But he kept his eyes cast toward the table and continued to eat his sandwich without the slightest reaction, leaving me to wonder whether my mother’s assessment of Sean’s life and death was something he had already accepted, maybe even agreed with. He was unwilling to look at me, to meet my eyes in a way that might trivialize my mother’s faith. Or perhaps the possibility of what she said consoled him, as it must have consoled my mother. Maybe the trauma of losing their fifteen-year-old son was less ened by believing his life was more than it might have been. Maybe faith has that effect.
My mother’s faith has always been a natural, constant, almost practical part of our household. Her days begin and end in prayer. Each morning she sits in the living room with a large glass of instant iced tea and roams page by page through her prayer book, offering up her prayers for the living, her hopes for the dead. It is a time of privacy, but one she conducts in plain view, fielding her family’s early morning inquiries calmly and quietly without ever looking up. When I still lived at home—as a child, as a teenager, and even as a young adult—I used to take my cereal into the living room, sit cross-legged on the couch across from my mother’s chair, and eat my breakfast while she prayed. I never spoke and she never acknowledged me, until, having finished my cereal, I would get up to leave and she would hold her glass of tea toward me, asking if I’d mind adding more ice. It was a ritual. It was a way to participate, if only peripherally, in my mother’s routine.
I don’t have the same kind of faith as my mother, and as I sat there that day eating lunch with my parents, I turned her belief about Sean into something more like metaphor, though I knew that was not how she meant it. To her, Sean was not merely angelic; he was an actual angel. And I knew if I asked the obvious question—which of us was he sent here to save—she would have many answers. Maybe it wasn’t just one of us. Maybe it was all of us. Or maybe it was someone we never even