A REVIEW OF THE HELPER

When I was Younger:

A review of Kathy Gilisinan’s (‘02) The Helpers

Written by Boaz Roth

I had been teaching AP English Literature and Composition at TJ for about 20 years when I finally received an invitation to “read” for the test (“read” is the College Board’s fancy way of saying “grade,” and in a typical week, I usually read around 1500 essays).

Kathy Gilisinan (‘02)

Photo by Jeannine Crider

Over the past four years, I’ve learned how these tests are graded (ummmm…“read”), and I’ve shared this knowledge with TJ students to great effect: 77% of last year’s TJ AP Literature students earned a 4 or 5 on the test—the two highest scores—while the national average for such marks was 44%. Investing my time in this grueling process has certainly been a win-win both for me and our students.

So imagine my dismay when I received my invitation letter last winter to read for AP Seminar. AP Seminar? What the heck? I didn’t even know AP Seminar existed. The letter demanded a straight up yes-or-no response and made no mention of reading for literature if I said no. I just about made up my mind to decline the offer, but my administrative superior—who shares a mortgage, three children, and two cats with me—“suggested” that by reading for AP Seminar, I could learn if it’s adaptable to the TJ curriculum. Defeated by her superior logic, I boarded a flight to the Salt Lake City reading, ready to learn something new. My AP Seminar assignment was to evaluate research-papers. Seminar students were given a range of media (a short story, an article about “Fast Fashion,” a video of 100,000 Estonians singing, a Rockwell painting, a piece from Democracy in America, and a few works of social science) and told to find a common theme. From that point, they had to write an eight-to-ten page paper about the theme using two of these sources and as many other sources as they deem appropriate. The vast majority of the papers I read focused on influencers, social networks, and fashion trends. When I returned home, I impressed my children—and administrative superior—with a newfound knowledge of Shein, Forever 21, and Kim Kardashian’s leopard-print dress. One task of the reading was to review the bibliography of each paper and flag less-than-credible sources (sorry, Wikipedia lovers). About midway through the reading week, I came across another essay examining the connection between fast fashion and the influencer community, when I nearly jumped out of my seat. In the bibliography, I saw an article from the Washington Post written by Kathy Gilsinan. I gasped audibly, grabbed the arm of my tablemate, and pointed at my screen. She asked if I knew who this Kathy Gilsinan person was. “Of course I know, Kathy Gilsinan,” I boasted proudly, “I taught her three times at Thomas Jefferson School!” Ms. Gilsinan (sorry, can’t break the habit) has a half-life at TJ that will last longer than the radioactivity of uranium. She graduated from here in June 2002 and entered Columbia

University that fall. The application essay she wrote has been required reading for the last 20 years of TJ’s rising seniors. A car mechanic in her

spare time at TJ (you read that correctly), Ms. Gilsinan wrote her ingenious self-evaluation from the car’s point of view. After graduating Columbia, Ms. Gilsinan continued her mastery of words by writing extensively for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Politico among others while somehow finding the time to manage one other monumental task: write a book about America’s initial response to the pandemic. The Helpers is a concise page-turner. It tracks the lives of seven individuals during the early part of the pandemic: a Covid patient, a vaccine developer, a CEO of a ventilator company, a paramedic, a nurse, and a chef. If you’ve counted only six people, your eyes haven’t deceived you. The Helpers’s 250 pages documents the lives of these individuals, but in the final chapter of the work a seventh person makes an appearance and properly closes the book: a funeral director.

On the surface, The Helpers certainly mirrors what we’d take as professional reportage, a mega-sized Atlantic or New Yorker piece. Clearly Ms. Gilsinan has honed her craft well in her career of reporting on contemporary American life. Yet to read the book as merely an examination of the battle against Covid from the frontlines is a drastic mistake. While The Helpers appears as a well-sourced historical postcard from an awful time in American history, Ms. Gilsinan has actually produced something else: an inverted murder mystery. Consider how she explains her methodology at the start of the work: “Dialogue is generally rendered as the book’s main characters recalled it in our interviews. In the case where the protagonist is deceased, I have reconstructed [the] story through interviews with family members (The Helpers, xi). In other words, of these six individuals whose lives she chronicles, one won’t survive. Typically in a murder mystery, we read to figure out who the killer is (hint: it’s Covid 19 here), but Ms. Gilsinan craftily flips the script and challenges us to discover who the victim will be (Hint: I’m not spoiling the twist here; read the book and find out for yourself). Instantly the stakes for the readers soar to the sky, and craftily Ms. Gilsinan reawakens a thought most of us considered in 2020: will we make it to 2021?

While this clever conceit gives The Helpers its skin, its beating heart is the tender devotion Ms. Gilsinan lavishes on each of her subjects. Not only does she show readers the detailed actions of the protagonists, we also enter their souls. We feel the guilt of the son barred from entering the hospital with his Covid-positive mother. We stand with the city nurse paralyzed about helping Covidpositive patients and tending to her parents who share an apartment with her. And to remind us of what else captivated America at that time, Ms. Gilsinan lets us see the world through the eyes of a Louisville chef who doubles as a high-school cooking teacher wondering both what will happen to her high school students kept home from school, while protests for Breonna Taylor engulf her city and the nation.

For those who know Ms. Gilsinan, it’s really no surprise that she produced this sort of book. As a student here, she embodied the virtues we love to see in the classroom: dedication to assignments, respect for colleagues (even the old, balding ones), spunk, and—most importantly— independence of thought. Beyond her academic excellences, however, was the care Ms. Gilsinan showered upon her peers. She genuinely cared about others. If a new student needed a friend, there was Ms. Gilsinan lending a hand. If someone’s heart was broken, without fail it would be Ms. Gilsinan dropping everything to escort her downtrodden classmate around campus. Ms. Gilsinan was a caring friend to all, and in The Helpers, through her words, she befriends both the living and, unfortunately, the dead. With her reputation solidly etched in the world of journalism, I hope that Ms. Gilsinan will aim her considerable command over language towards fiction and compose a novel. Given Illustration by Jordin Isip what her career has produced, such a work would have a devastating effect on readers, and doubtlessly many will become fans of her abilities. In fact, if she embraces the world of fiction, I’m sure that in a decade or so, when

I’m back to reading AP Literature essays, one of the students will cite her work, and again

I’ll blurt out to a bleary-eyed tablemate, “I know Kathy Gilsinan!”