Life Events

March 16, 2020
Waclawiak pivots from the coastal Connecticut setting of The Invaders for a bleak, atmospheric foray through the deserts and valleys around Los Angeles. Thirty-seven-year-old Evelyn, stagnant in a failing marriage, proceeds through a series of cyclical patterns that hold her in limbo, such as driving toward the Eastern Sierras, away from her husband, only to return to make dinner for him, then drink alone at home—“not to wait for him exactly, and not to get drunk exactly.” While battling her insomnia with a weed pen and Xanax, she applies for a training program on “how to help other people die” and becomes a death doula. Waclawiak follows Evelyn into the worlds of three of Evelyn’s clients: Daphne, a 64-year-old cancer patient with an overexcited cocker spaniel; Lawrence, a former producer of porn films who’s lost all hope; and Daniel, a 42-year-old agoraphobe with cirrhosis. While the job initially gives Evelyn a sense of purpose, she tends to break a company rule against “making the death about yourself”—she worries about what Daphne thinks of her, and wears lipstick to get attention from a male coworker. Waclawiak maintains a gloomy tone through well-observed details of the landscape (“flat, dusty land dotted with wind-worn white crosses jutting out a different mile markers along the road, signifying people who didn’t make it home”), which mixes well with Evelyn’s wry irreverence. This doesn’t promise answers, nor does it give any, and it’s better for it.

March 15, 2020
A messy meditation on life in the face of death from the author of The Invaders (2015). Evelyn is waiting for her parents to die--not looking forward to it but preoccupied with this inevitability for which she does not know how to prepare. She's also waiting for her marriage to die; she's given up, but she wants her husband, Bobby, to be the one who asks for a divorce. While she waits for both of these endings, she checks out temporarily by taking long drives around Los Angeles, drinking wine, and hitting her weed pen. She's searching the web for a grief support group when she finds a program that teaches people how to help the terminally ill die. Training for this task compels Evelyn to think deeply about her own life, as does preparing her clients for death. One of the pleasures of this book is that these experiences do not lead to dramatic revelations. The shifts in Evelyn's thoughts and behavior are subtle and slow. She never makes an explicit connection between her work as a death doula and her decision to finally leave Bobby, but she begins to take practical steps toward that end. Indeed, the process that Evelyn devises to leave her marriage is similar to the process she uses to ease clients toward their final exits. And both processes are morally, ethically, and emotionally fraught. This is not an action-packed novel, and the narrative moves at a meditative pace. What makes it engaging is its narrative voice and its cleareyed assessment of the human condition. Evelyn is self-aware enough to understand her despair and resilient enough to not succumb to it entirely. This does not mean that she has any idea what she should do in order to feel contented and fulfilled--and it's not that she hasn't tried. In a passage in which Evelyn is trying to get her doctor to increase her prescription for a sedative, she considers all the therapists she's sought help from. The obstacle between Evelyn and happiness is not a grand tragedy; it is the accumulated weight of the small tragedies we all endure and carry with us. Contemplative and complex.

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April 15, 2020
A young wife contemplates the end of her marriage against the backdrop of her parents' failing health and decides the best coping mechanism may be found in training as an exit guide who helps terminally ill patients commit suicide. As she counsels Daphne, Lawrence, and Dan, she comes to admire these individuals for the control they exert over their own circumstances, a course of action Evelyn works toward as she gathers the strength to leave her husband. Because she can't be a good wife, Evelyn considers herself a failure and seeks escape through drugs and pills, and driving aimlessly away from Los Angeles' sprawl and superficiality into the desert, where things are as stark and as bleak as her outlook. Richly symbolic and undeniably haunting, Waclawiak's (The Invaders, 2015) atmospheric novel of emotional despair and existential dread is a dark and frankly depressing study of one woman's hopelessness, and yet there is much to applaud in the manner in which her heroine honestly assesses her limitations and acknowledges her pain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)