The Tincture of Time

January 16, 2017
Silver’s (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton) memoir of her newborn daughter’s medical trauma is smartly conceived and well written. Medical is a parenthetical for a reason: “Our story is nothing. A two week NICU stay with no surgery thus far. A fever.” But it doesn’t feel like nothing to Silver and her husband, the parents of a six-week-old with seizures caused by a potentially tragic grade IV bleed in her brain. For two weeks, there is nothing to do but bide time while tiny Abby is prodded and poked. They wait for a diagnosis, for a certainty that will not come. Several social workers question them closely, looking for signs of abuse, an added stress that only stops when a scan turns up no signs of trauma. At her daughter’s lowest point, Silver’s sister-in-law arranges for 40 women to bake challah while saying prayers for Abby’s recovery. Silver watches via Skype, her thoughts wandering to Les Miserables and Amadeus and the power of music, distracting the reader from what the more poignant power of dozens of strangers united in one hope. It is this reliance on tropes like Google searches and dictionary definitions that sometimes dulls the emotional heart of her otherwise excellent book.

March 1, 2017
A mother's uncertainty about her baby daughter's medical care pervades this unsettling memoir.Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, 2014) is both a novelist and an attorney, occupations that provide different perspectives on her plight as a concerned parent. A few weeks after birth, her daughter, Abby, inexplicably began showing symptoms of a seizure, perhaps a prelude to something worse. She then developed an alarming fever, which left almost as quickly and inexplicably as it arrived. To the various physicians who examined her, she was "a self-contained enigma, despite a hefty team of specialists offering varied hypotheses." The author herself was surrounded by doctors--her father, her husband, and others--but she came to see how inexact a science medicine could be. For the creative writer, "this is quickly becoming a story that has nothing to do with grief or planning for grief, or treatment to combat an illness, but rather coping with the uncertainty of health in the dense fog of evolving medicine." For an attorney experienced in cases of medical malpractice and whose father found his career threatened by an unfounded claim, Silver felt beleaguered by questions that implied guilt or blame--as if she did something to her daughter, dropped her or shook her, and either wouldn't admit it or couldn't remember it. Memory itself becomes a reflection of universal uncertainty, as does the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner, Waiting for Godot, and Hamlet's "To be or not to be." Ultimately, the author attempts "to control my surroundings as best I can without losing semblance of self, without stopping life, without changing behavior to a point of invisibility. And I create a narrative that evolves daily." Readers will share Silver's unease with uncertainty. The attempt to balance personal trauma with wider cultural reference is a tricky challenge, but this will resonate with anyone who has experienced diagnostic difficulties.

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