We Came Here to Forget

We Came Here to Forget, by Andrea Dunlop

I've tried writing stories about family trauma--my own family trauma, I mean. I haven't yet been successful. It's slippery, at once too close and too far away. I can't pin it down in a way that makes sense to other people, and there's nothing worse than someone hearing the whole story of the worst thing that ever happened to you, and shrugging it off. Well, that's not true--there are things worse. But it's pretty awful.

I'm not sure We Came Here to Forget is completely successful either. It's moody and painful and beautiful, and the way it dances around the story of what happened in the protagonist's family feels too accurate--that combination of not wanting to admit what happened and not knowing how to explain what happened that results in a mess of lying and obfuscating and running away from one's entire life to live in a different country and language for a while. So in that sense it's a great protrayal--as is the way it's transposed into a different place, a different person's life. You try to get distance so you can fit the whole thing into the frame.

In the end, to have Katie's new friends be understanding of the magnitude of the injury, that's the part that struck me as a little bit... not false, but thin. Because in my experience, when the injury doesn't fit into the narratives we all know--romantic betrayal, family rejection, domestic violence, sexual abuse--most people don't quite know what to do with it. And they often think that if it isn't straightforward, it must not be a big deal. Even when you're so closely involved as to be making reports to the authorities, even when there are children it was your responsibility to protect, and you couldn't protect them, if the lines of that responsibility don't feel familiar to people, they mostly don't understand why the trauma sticks with you.

Don't get me wrong, I really liked this book. I came away melancholy, but satisfied. I'm just hoping that someday Andrea will write another novel that deals with the same themes, with a few more years of experience. Maybe if she can figure out how to write the story, I can figure it out too.