Showing posts with label The Death Fairy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Death Fairy. Show all posts

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Dreaming About Our Mothers


Still reading The Death Fairy by Laird Stevens. With the holiday weekend and all, I'm pecking through it. Last night I get to the conversations where Asia and Jessica discuss their dreams about their mothers. I put the book down because it makes me think about the dreams I've had about my mother.

One of my favorites. We're swimming in a lake outside Paris. (In the real word, she had a scholarship to the Sorbonne. She married my father instead.) It's one of those days; the rays of light coming through the trees are incandescent and the grass is technicolor green. A Monet painting without the sailboats.


My mother is my mother, but she's also about sixteen. In the dream I'm younger than she is, but not much. I'm in the water. Other swimmers laugh and splash around me. People of all ages lounge on the shore and beneath the trees, my mother among them.

When the sun shimmers with the last light of day, I swim to shore. My mother throws me a towel. I squeeze the water from my hair. She's hurrying me along.

"What's the rush?"

"We've got to get to the city," she says. "We're going dancing."

I wake up, filled with life and wonder. What magic, this enchanted interlude transcending the boundaries of time and space.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The Death Fairy


Now, I'm reading The Death Fairy by Laird Stevens. Another random pick up for Free on my kindle. I chose it, I think, because Asia's mother committed suicide.

It is ... different. The writing leaves me critical. Too much telling, I say, then have to smile. Writers, bah! But the story is ... interesting. I'm not sure what to think about it. Is it leading me down a primrose path to a groaning cliche. Possibly something sordid? I can't tell, because they're the good bits.

Like the photo albums filled with pictures of her dead mother, and the stories Asia makes up about them, and how she believes that makes her different than her friend Beverly, who has only the one story to tell about her dead mother.

Kind of a dead end, that one crippling story.

And then there's the fun bit about how egocentric the idea of karma is because the idea that  ...  Everything that happens to you in life happens because of something you did ... does kind of make it all about you.

Pop. Burst another bubble.