“Grief requires imagination: mental images of the one you’ve lost, of the world that would have been.”
Author: Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry’s life is divided into the before and after. There was her childhood, imperfect but still eclipsed by love, and then there was her mother’s brutal murder and everything that came afterwards. After the Eclipse is Sarah’s memoir in which she relives the murder, the trauma, the blame and suspicion, and seeks answers. It’s not fiction – so don’t expect the gumshoeing aspect, the grand payoff, the whodunnit that ties everything together into a neat bow. Instead, expect the poignant, harrowing, and disturbing story of a young woman’s life upended, of the wide-ranging impacts of grief and unanswered questions, a story about the aftermath of suspicion and living in the shadow of a gruesome crime.
After the Eclipse is oddly lyrical, despite the difficult subject matter. Perry’s love for her mother, Crystal, comes through in all the language and descriptions, the poetic testament to a child’s adoration. It’s not an unbiased report, and while Perry strives for accuracy, the woman she reveals her mother to be through actions (such as affairs, dating a married man, etc.) and the woman she worships (the perfect, nearly angelic mother, filled with beauty and pathos) clash, creating the heart of the memoir. Perry clearly has a rose-tinted view of her departed parent – and who wouldn’t in such circumstances? Perry was only 12 when she woke up one night to hear her mother being bludgeoned to death. The aftereffects color all her memories, all her moments, and leave the author with an unassuaged longing that brings us to tears. Whatever her mother’s very real, very human faults, the tragedy is still abundantly clear, especially in the eyes of a now orphaned child. The worst has only begun.
Authorities felt that Perry was old enough to know more – to have surely seen more. The endless hours of examination, the potent certainty that this traumatized child was lying, was hiding something, was somehow complicit or even involved in her mother’s murder, sets Perry on a trajectory of loneliness and rejection. Bouncing from one relative’s house to the next, she receives no succor, and we watch the beautiful young soul wither, reaching out even further for a mother who becomes progressively more loving and perfect in hindsight. It’s a very revealing memoir, one where Perry scoops out her bleeding insides and shows them to us, nonplussed, finding the voice that the authorities and that the family denied her. It would turn out, of course, that she was right all along.
Then, of course, there is the fear. Whoever murdered her mother left behind a witness. Was she next? Was every creak in the house the murderer coming to finish the business?
As Perry grows older, still failing to find connection, she begins to wonder about her mother. All the little things she can now never know. All the things that she can never ask. The book comes together then through interviews with family and friends, steadily trying to paint a portrait of the person she lost. While Crystal is written as a saint, the main character, as it were, is Perry herself. Her grief is a living thing, the psychological torment of having been through so much, waited so many years for answers, and finally having them, only to realize that her mother is still gone, takes the beautiful prose and morphs it into a half love song, half dirge.
After the Eclipse is incredibly well written and beyond moving. It’s a narrative with a heart and soul, a testament to the bond of mother and child, and a warning about callously dealing with the grief of another, especially a child. It’s a book you won’t soon forget. We leave Perry as a friend, hoping that in her life she will someday find some peace, yet knowing that this grief and that terrible night is now a part of her forever.
– Frances Carden
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