| written by Amy Maestas
|
| Author Tekla Miller in her home
office. Miller will host a Jan. 10 book signing for
her latest book, A Bowl of Cherries, at Maria’s./Photo
by Dustin Bradford. |
Book
Review: Overcoming life’s biggest blows is
difficult for anyone, but when your life is marked by
suicide, depression, rape, abuse and poverty, it takes
a person with Herculean emotional strength to triumph.
Durango author Tekla Miller, who endured all these blows
and more, succeeds.
In her newest memoir, A Bowl of Cherries,
Miller gives readers a glance at her childhood, which
was rife with misfortune from infancy to her liberating
graduation from high school. At age 9, Miller’s
father, once on track to pitch for the New York Yankees,
suffers extensive injuries from a head-on train collision.
From his full-body cast he tries to keep his family together
as the money dries up, his wife becomes embittered and
the mercurial marriage deteriorates. He soon dies of a
heart attack, to the dismay and relief of Miller’s
mother.
 Four
years later, when Miller is only 13, her mother suddenly
becomes prone to nightlong wanderings. Tightlipped and
stoic, in spite of the family’s first chance to
escape poverty, her mother tries to press on but eventually
succumbs to the overwhelming guilt about not grieving
her husband’s death. She hangs herself in the family’s
basement, leaving only a stunning note on the bathroom
door: “I am dead.”
That leaves Miller, the youngest of
three children, parentless and seemingly stuck in a pattern
of misfortune that she can’t shake because her family
life set her up for it. Her older brother, Chuck, joins
the military and becomes a distant observer to the pain
that continues to plague the family. Miller’s older
sister, Alyce, takes her in. But it’s hardly a refuge
or salvation, since Alyce is married to a womanizing,
abusive brute named Angelo. Miller spends her teenage
years forging a new kind of relationship with Alyce while
also frequently on the run from the dreadful marriage.
In the aftermath of her parents’
tragedies, Miller carries on not only because she has
no choice, but also because her mother’s spin on
accepting life’s messes – delivered through
platitudes – are forever stuck in her memory. “You
have to take the bitter with the better,” her mother
was fond of saying. Even more, particularly when Miller
felt life was least fair to her, her mother would tell
her, “It’s one of the vicissitudes of life.”
These are remarkable precepts coming
from a woman whose poverty and contempt for her husband
kept her stuck in an ugly place, but couldn’t save
her from her own hand. It’s these platitudes that
Miller hangs onto for hope and flight from a too-familiar
world of abuse and oppression.
Though slow to start, by the time
Miller relates stories of running from Angelo, the attention
she pays to details are impressive. She vividly describes
clothes she wore on various special occasions, allowing
readers to understand how meaningful they were. She easily
conveys the rare care-free moments by detailing her environment,
like what songs were playing on the radio when she, Alyce
and Alyce’s children, arrived in Los Angeles after
leaving Angelo for a third and final time. Miller writes
about those moments with clarity and joy. They evoke feelings
of freedom and for a moment takes readers away from all
the dolor the family tries to endure during the Depression
in Syracuse, N.Y.
Fortunately, Miller’s stories
aren’t weighed down with self-pity. And despite
the gravity of the events and the constant violations
she endures, she never politicizes or apologizes. She
is not a confessional sentimentalist.
Unfortunately, her tragic stories
lack fire and art. Miller concentrates more on the superficial
story lines, making sure the chronology is right but never
writing with the conviction that exposes her emotional
core. She doesn’t draw a self-portrait. Readers
know the events of the story, but they don’t know
how these events were shaping her life. Was she paralyzed
by self-criticism? What were her ambitions? By focusing
too much on events and other people, she fades in describing
herself.
True, Miller grew up in a family that
tried hard to believe in accepting their fate without
dwelling on adversity. But in many of Miller’s stories,
she missed an opportunity to really nail down that point
with readers and show them how manner trumps matter. Had
Miller let us inside her heart, sharing with us her opinions,
sharing with us her analysis of her life instead of just
simply recounting routes along the journeys, these stories
would be more heart-rendering.
There is a desultory quality to the
memoir that doesn’t quite satisfy the element of
survivorship that is intrinsically part of a lifetime
of such hardships. Miller surely survives; how much enrichment
she would have given readers if she’d said how she
did so.
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