Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues photograph by tom rankin
characters think they are making good choices, stumble, reconsider, and finally resign themselves to the fact that life is messy, complicated, and hard to predict. In the end they do the best they can and hope to be forgiven for their inevitable mistakes – like Stanley, who decides that feigning dementia will be the quickest way to force his son to get on with his life; or C.J., single mother to a baby fathered by her married lover, who waits patiently for him to choose her over his wife. Both these decisions are made with the best intent – though the reader can see the folly – and
neither situation turns out as one might expect. Lives are rarely pretty in McCorkle’s fiction, but they are real. Each character’s life feels full, and yet, the losses are tangible. There’s Abby, a young girl who has lost her dog – and we fear her mother has had a devious hand in it. And there’s Rachel, who has lost both her husband and a lover named Joe – her one indiscretion in life – a man who may or may not have been her only true love. In this book, it seems that everyone has lost something, and everyone tries to believe anything but the truth. Illusion is so much more comfortable. McCorkle shows us that for most of these people, living out the last phase of their lives – the last of many everyone spirals through – is still living, and clinging to an outdated identity without embracing who we are at the end is losing out on precious opportunities. It is still a life, though maybe not what we’ve had before or what we think we want. Like Ben, the struggling magician in the novel who can make a girl disappear, many of these characters
right Kelly Starling Lyons and her award-winning book
feel invisible in their world, on the margins of society, but their lives are important and shouldn’t be forgotten just because they are old or ordinary. My favorite character is Sadie, a woman who is carefully and gracefully moving toward the end. In the meantime she creates pictures for other residents, inserting them into scenes they may not have ever experienced – an old-fashioned way of photoshopping – by cutting and pasting photographs together. Through these pictures, she offers people additional lives, different worlds, alternative realities. And in their less than perfect condition, characters line up for the illusion. It feels like McCorkle has been moving toward this book for a long time. Watching her own father die in the 1990s and now seeing her mother age in a retirement home, McCorkle is perhaps envisioning her own future, as well as all of ours, and showing us that our final chapter may hold what we can’t imagine and may least expect. Most of her characters find that in the end before the end, life after life may show us truths we could never see before. n
courtesy of kelly Starling Lyons
Kelly Starling Lyons received the 2013 North Carolina American Association of University Women Award for Juvenile Literature for Tea Cakes for Tosh, published by G.P. Putnam’s, which also published two other picture books by her in 2012: Ellen’s Broom and Hope’s Gift. Just Us Books published Lyons’s first book, a chapter book called NEATE: Eddie’s Ordeal (2004), and another picture book, One Million Men and Me (2007). Lyons is a native of Pittsburg, PA, but has family roots in Rockingham County and found the inspiration for some of her books in North Carolina. She has lived in Raleigh now for a dozen years. n
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courtesy of kelly Starling Lyons
2013 nc aauw AWARD
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