"The Ghostliness of Longing: Mary South's YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN"
by Cecily Berberat
Just yesterday—and three weeks into state sanctioned self-isolation—a writer friend asked me, what will people write about post-pandemic? My already restless and often snarky brain judged the race to publish innovatively contagion-related flash, the likely renaissance of Huis Clos homages. I will resist the temptation, I replied, like a jerk. But it appears not. Writing around the novel coronavirus is harder than I thought. Harder still, try reading around it. The subtext of everything, across genres, is now “pandemic.” The virus reduces trivial compositions to a whisper while amplifying those that aim to describe the frailty of our world, that acknowledge the ghosts of all that has been lost or threatens to be. I hope this resonance will benefit Mary South, an impressive writer whose debut collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, both unexpectedly (and I suspect inopportunely) coincides with this much bigger news story. We hear that the best fiction transcends time and place. We may have forgotten to include sickness and health on that list.
The characters of You Will Never Be Forgotten are often nurses and doctors, as affected by their care giving roles as those they attempt to serve. For South, these relationships are little more than porous projections, a transformative looking glass that skews and stretches the individual on either side. “Horrid complicity” in the unwinnable game of life and death highlights one’s most basic needs. A nurse in an Ishiguro-esque Amazon warehouse falls in love with and commits violence for the aberrantly conscious organ donor she raises to harvest. A mourning brain surgeon buys a ball gown and encourages her sons to toss all material possessions into their backyard pool. How else can one feel alive when confronted with the betrayal of mortality? “There will be a day that kills you or someone you love,” the brain surgeon writes. And we have known this. So why is the “bittersweet existential aftertaste” of grief and guilt such an inseparable pairing? All endings necessitate a backward glance perhaps and memory isn’t always generous. Or sometimes it is, as when rating pain on a scale of one to ten (that repetitive hospital question) reminds one of a similar game rating marital bliss with a spouse (now deceased). Or when an internet troll surmises that endings might be for the best. They might enable us to “love without believing in our capacity to love.” Life, whether it belongs to us or someone else, remains as all-encompassing as it is forever falling short.
The recognition or ignorance of mortality is a source of weird and wondrous humor throughout these stories as South throws different generations onstage and watches them wrestle it out. A nursing home night shift attendant’s love life is sabotaged by the gravitas of his geriatric charge’s phone sex recordings. Older people have a leg up in that they remember what it was to be young. But South doesn’t write one way streets. So a mother’s attempt to curate her daughter’s memory is overtaken by the child’s drive to create her own. Fairy tales warn children of their cannibalistic elders’ hunger for youth, but South reminds us that the “adult world is equally afraid of being devoured by the child.” We are as often devastated by the lost versions of our many selves, our personal failures and broken dreams, as we are by the loss of loved ones. The never-never land of a Turkish hostel serves as nursery for grown men fleeing their insecurities. But Wendy grapples too, as much with the anguish of a child’s death as with the abbreviation of her own hoped-for maternity.
Mothers are both everywhere and nowhere in these stories, their absences rivaled only by the intensity of the projections that replace them. Architects and their buildings, hostel hosts, and camp counselors. For Mary South, nurturing is just another way for people to connect, an effort her characters rarely accomplish. These stories focus so intently on the space between people that one could forget anyone ever succeeds in uniting. “If only I could establish the right distance from her,” a man laments. This is quite a contemporary problem. Acting out a sexual fantasy, a couple repeats one after the other, “it feels strange to love you.” The reader is left to wonder, but does it feel good? Perhaps not at so great a remove. “How you cope with loneliness determines whether you are strong or weak, particularly if you are a woman.” If this is true, I dread the impending judgment. But South’s characters openly confess to their own incapacity for friendship. We see them resort to stand-ins, however improbable. Following a failed attempt to confront her attacker’s new girlfriend, a rape victim sets out food for the neighborhood wildcat. A once beautiful television celebrity, imprinted upon by a diverse generation of fans, predictably disappoints.
Perhaps it is this insisted-upon emptiness, if anything, that gives a slight sag to the middle of what is otherwise a reliably solid collection. We have heard about our over-reliance on the superficial reflections of the digital world, the swift and appeasing arrival of our own sardonic wit. But what propels each of these stories is the quest for a more authentic moment, a shared vulnerability that can’t be quashed, whether by physical death or bullying mantra (“the internet is forever”). This may explain why the collection’s penultimate story emerges so satisfyingly, bringing to mind other masterful writers of the short story that share Mary’s name. A widower, receiving texts from his deceased wife’s phone number, recollects both the everyday humor and disappointment of their shared life together. “Whenever I long for my wife I lose her more and more. That’s another fact in support of ghosts: for what could be more ghostly than missing someone so intensely that you can no longer remember her as she was?” While we reckon with the loss of loved ones, lifestyles, and visions of our own immortal selves, the ghostliness of longing is an authentic experience indeed.
Cecily Berberat is the 2018 winner of the Baltimore Review's winter fiction contest and was awarded the 2012 Montana Meadowlark Award by the author Richard Ford. Her work can also be found in The North American Review, Mad Cap Review, Birds Thumb, and Chicago Literati. She writes in Brooklyn.
