Dear Damage

Starred review from November 22, 2021
Poet Farmer (The Women) parses her complicated family history to create a heart-wrenching portrait of love, family, loss, and aging in this astounding collection. Two weeks after her grandmother slipped and broke her neck, Farmer’s grandfather arrived at the hospital with a gun, shooting her grandmother in a “mercy killing” and trying, though failing, to kill himself. What follows is a dizzying portrayal of Farmer’s grief, told in short, effective bursts from both before and after the shooting. In “Aftermath” she reflects on the way “grief makes you urgent and useless,” and in “Contradiction, 2014,” muses that “as much as I wish my grandfather hadn’t done what he did, I don’t know if I would undo it.” She builds the collection around her grandparents, sharing transcripts of their conversations about celebrities, hitchhikers, and marriage, and also experiments with form in “Selected Internet Comments, 2014–2015,” in which she shares replies to articles on the shooting. In “Mercy,” she writes, “while I’m skeptical of mining beauty from pain... or landing on a diamond takeaway or even claiming good can come from it, I’ve learned that time-freezing anguish makes for micro-moments of unexpected reverence.” Farmer exceeds her intention; the moments she depicts teem with power. This potent work introduces Farmer as a writer to watch.

February 1, 2022
A writer reckons with her grandmother's "mercy killing" in this set of loosely connected essays. In 2014, Farmer's family became a national news story. Her grandmother, a quadriplegic in severe pain after a fall, was shot and killed by her husband in a Carson City, Nevada, hospital to end her suffering. (He intended to kill himself as well, but the gun "broke apart in his hands.") In her debut nonfiction book, Farmer discusses some of the public responses to the incident and ensuing debates over assisted suicide. An appendix reproduces a formal letter she wrote in support of her grandfather and the state's motion to dismiss charges against him. But most of the book represents the author's interior effort to assess her grandparents' relationship (she reproduces snippets of interviews with them), the manifestations of grief that followed the incident, and the author's own struggles to write about it. She's attuned to how much America is steeped in gun idioms: "It's strange how guns suddenly appear in ordinary phrases: Under fire. Stick to your guns. Oh, shoot." Yet her sympathy for her grandfather isn't absolute. "Regardless of my grandfather's intention, she writes, "I consider the hearts stopped at the sound of the single shot, the psyches jarred, the people who thought, if even for a second, that they should run or take cover, who thought, This is it." Farmer weaves these considerations, somewhat awkwardly, into essays exploring her own feelings about family: a failed first marriage, a second marriage so defined by hand-to-mouth living (to make ends meet, she stitched together multiple adjunct teaching gigs) that children seem unlikely. In that regard, Farmer's book feels like two solid but incomplete essay collections. However, at her best, the author exposes how trauma and family shape our lives no matter how we try to resist. A slim and uneven but striking book, sensitive to grief and tested relationships.

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