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Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.
According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.
According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patty Yumi Cottrell.
263 pages, Hardcover
First published March 21, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 521 reviews
June 19, 2018
A highly memorable narrator goes through stages of grief via intriguing, bizarre methods. Compact and brilliantly written, even hilarious at times, but loses a star because it wasn’t particularly entertaining.
November 28, 2017
"Part of the purpose of my investigation was to shed some light in the holes and the crevices and the parts of his life that didn't line up, the odd details, etc. It reminded me of shining the flashlight into the crevices of my once-bedbug-infested bed, except instead of bedbugs, I was searching for the odd, and the surprising details of someone's life, the strangeness. What was the primary driving force for his life? I wondered."
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a book that allows the reader to dive deep into the mind of Helen Moran, a 32 year old woman who was adopted from Korea into a family that was highly religious. Her adoptive parents' interpretation of their religion seeped into all parts of their life, including money and expectations of family. When Helen receives a call that lets her know that her brother has died by suicide, this sends her back to her hometown in Milwaukee to her parents' home where she begins to attempt to unfold her brother's experience and what could possibly have led to his suicide.
I rarely give 5 stars; 3 stars + is a good rating for me. Two things can push a book into 5 star territory: 1) If it makes me cry, and 2) if I feel that the author has sketched the characters in a way that truly makes them feel like people and not like plot placeholders, or devices to Send A Message (not that books whose primary goal is to send a message are bad or lesser than, just that sometimes it feels artificial). This second point enforces that the author allows me as a reader to see every single inch of the character, their thoughts when they see things that people normally look away from, how they feel about bodies, plants, cars, parks, skin, sex, books, food - everything, no matter whether that feeling is strong or apathetic. This book has done both of those things.
(TW for discussion about suicide forthcoming:)
This is not a book where I can say that the author was trying to do X, Y, and Z. However, through Helen's exploration of her brother's suicide, it presented her thoughts and perceptions of common notions about mental health and suicide. For example, people often think that avoiding the word "suicide" or talking about dying directly will encourage death-seeking behavior, which is not true. In fact, it can encourage people to talk more openly about thoughts that are typically shamed or shied away from due to stigma. Helen also goes in search of the "warning signs" that people hear about that could lead up to a person's death by suicide and questions things about her past and her relationship with her adoptive parents and brother.
In the midst of this, she works as a social worker for underprivileged youth and she uses her work here where she has stretched and exercised her empathy to the fullest, in order to grapple with her thoughts. We see her clients affect her in ways that the author lends as indirect, in that Helen does not connect her X experience to Y event, but that she is reminded viscerally of something that happened in her work that she uses for interpretation, even subconsciously. It takes a brilliant author to discern between that type of mental and emotional work and Patty Yumi Cottrell has absolutely done it here.
Take, for instance:
"[...] to hear human voices and to known and truly feel that there were people below, and at the same time, to not feel compelled to join them, it was a luxurious feeling to cherish, because the exact texture of that feeling happened so few times in my life."
At multiple times in the book, Helen tries to find her place with her sexuality, demonstrating that it's fine to not assign a label to yourself and that it's ok being in a place of exploration and discovery in her 30s. While I understand the need for books where characters explicitly state how they identify, here we see something a little less defined, because she is still searching for a way to define herself, but also because she states that she is fine with being in a state where she doesn't really know. The title of the book is demonstrative of what can happen when people question, and "disrupt the peace" of others' comfort that they have been stewing in for an extended period of time.
This book presents characters as they are - no frills, and therefore largely up to the reader's interpretation. Everyone will be affected (or not) in some way by this book, but what that is, I cannot tell you. While some books' meanings and purpose are clear cut, the beauty of this one is that it is an exercise in, like stated above, sitting in a state of unknown and trying things on, in constant flux and flow of content and discontent. It is an exercise in making connections that you didn't see before, and being comfortable with the fact that absolutely everyone doesn't know absolutely everything.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a book that allows the reader to dive deep into the mind of Helen Moran, a 32 year old woman who was adopted from Korea into a family that was highly religious. Her adoptive parents' interpretation of their religion seeped into all parts of their life, including money and expectations of family. When Helen receives a call that lets her know that her brother has died by suicide, this sends her back to her hometown in Milwaukee to her parents' home where she begins to attempt to unfold her brother's experience and what could possibly have led to his suicide.
I rarely give 5 stars; 3 stars + is a good rating for me. Two things can push a book into 5 star territory: 1) If it makes me cry, and 2) if I feel that the author has sketched the characters in a way that truly makes them feel like people and not like plot placeholders, or devices to Send A Message (not that books whose primary goal is to send a message are bad or lesser than, just that sometimes it feels artificial). This second point enforces that the author allows me as a reader to see every single inch of the character, their thoughts when they see things that people normally look away from, how they feel about bodies, plants, cars, parks, skin, sex, books, food - everything, no matter whether that feeling is strong or apathetic. This book has done both of those things.
(TW for discussion about suicide forthcoming:)
This is not a book where I can say that the author was trying to do X, Y, and Z. However, through Helen's exploration of her brother's suicide, it presented her thoughts and perceptions of common notions about mental health and suicide. For example, people often think that avoiding the word "suicide" or talking about dying directly will encourage death-seeking behavior, which is not true. In fact, it can encourage people to talk more openly about thoughts that are typically shamed or shied away from due to stigma. Helen also goes in search of the "warning signs" that people hear about that could lead up to a person's death by suicide and questions things about her past and her relationship with her adoptive parents and brother.
In the midst of this, she works as a social worker for underprivileged youth and she uses her work here where she has stretched and exercised her empathy to the fullest, in order to grapple with her thoughts. We see her clients affect her in ways that the author lends as indirect, in that Helen does not connect her X experience to Y event, but that she is reminded viscerally of something that happened in her work that she uses for interpretation, even subconsciously. It takes a brilliant author to discern between that type of mental and emotional work and Patty Yumi Cottrell has absolutely done it here.
Take, for instance:
"[...] to hear human voices and to known and truly feel that there were people below, and at the same time, to not feel compelled to join them, it was a luxurious feeling to cherish, because the exact texture of that feeling happened so few times in my life."
At multiple times in the book, Helen tries to find her place with her sexuality, demonstrating that it's fine to not assign a label to yourself and that it's ok being in a place of exploration and discovery in her 30s. While I understand the need for books where characters explicitly state how they identify, here we see something a little less defined, because she is still searching for a way to define herself, but also because she states that she is fine with being in a state where she doesn't really know. The title of the book is demonstrative of what can happen when people question, and "disrupt the peace" of others' comfort that they have been stewing in for an extended period of time.
This book presents characters as they are - no frills, and therefore largely up to the reader's interpretation. Everyone will be affected (or not) in some way by this book, but what that is, I cannot tell you. While some books' meanings and purpose are clear cut, the beauty of this one is that it is an exercise in, like stated above, sitting in a state of unknown and trying things on, in constant flux and flow of content and discontent. It is an exercise in making connections that you didn't see before, and being comfortable with the fact that absolutely everyone doesn't know absolutely everything.
November 3, 2021
Reposted in acknowledgement of Patrick Cottrell's Whiting award
The Committee's nomination reads:
Patrick Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a giddy, furious wallop of a novel. Casting the reader into the tense space between humor and horror, Cottrell engages deeply with repulsion, disgust, antipathy, and grief; he refuses entirely to resort to false transcendence. The bravery of this is astounding. His work opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity, the politics of belonging, and the problem of other minds.
Re-read after the longlisting for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses. 5 stars - and finally a worthy successor to the great Thomas Bernhard.
And Other Stories is one of the UK’s wonderful small independent publishers: they aim to publish writing that is mind-blowing, often ‘challenging’ (Maureen Freely) and ‘shamelessly literary’ (Stuart Evers) – opening a space for exploration and discovery.
As a subscriber, this novel is the 5th book from them I have read this year (albeit this was a review copy provided by the publisher), and the description given in apposite. All of the books were ones I am proud to have helped get published but some were a challenge to read (see e.g. Black Wave): these aren’t novels that are meant to sit in the reader’s comfort zone.
Sorry to Disrupt The Peace certainly fits the challenging mould, and won’t be to everyone’s taste (see other reviews) but this is one of my favourite books of 2017.
Our first-person narrator Helen was born in Korea but adopted at a young age by a white American couple in Milwaukee, who also adopted another Korean boy.
Highly dysfunctional she is nevertheless wonderfully self-obsessed and delusional ("I always related any given situation to myself, another of my great talents") and decides that she will go home to help her estranged parents:
There is a lot of autobiographical overlap with Cottrell’s own previous life (see the interview sourced below in The Guardian for the detail) and the novel is clearly grounded in his own experience and emotion, but still fictional.
Given this invitation to make one’s own subjective response, to me the novel was most resonant as a novel in response to the, in my view, greatest novelist of the last 50 years, Thomas Bernhard, and in particular his masterful Correction - albeit with a very different if ultimately equally tragic brother-sister relationship. In Cottrell’s own words:
Helen’s one brief moment of success, as a performance artist, was ended by accusations of plagiarism, but she justifies her approach to herself:
And Cottrell's prose is full of wonderful black comedy:
Ultimately a blackly comic, emotionally moving and highly literary novel – strongly recommended.
Sources:
LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/p...
Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
The Committee's nomination reads:
Patrick Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a giddy, furious wallop of a novel. Casting the reader into the tense space between humor and horror, Cottrell engages deeply with repulsion, disgust, antipathy, and grief; he refuses entirely to resort to false transcendence. The bravery of this is astounding. His work opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity, the politics of belonging, and the problem of other minds.
Re-read after the longlisting for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses. 5 stars - and finally a worthy successor to the great Thomas Bernhard.
Why wouldn't anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?Helen, in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell
Just as Altensam was alien to him, so he must have seemed a foreign element to his family, they had in the end worn each other up on chronic mutual recriminations, primordial recriminations, Roithamer wrote, that is, he, Roithamer , on the one side and Roithamer's family on the other, were wearing each other out in the most inhuman way, a way least worthy of human beings, in this process of sheer mutual exhaustion. His natural bent for studying ie for studying everything, however, had enabled him quite early in life, by studying Altensam, to see through Altensam and thereby to see through himself and to achieve insight and to take action and thanks to these constant ongoing lifelong studies he'd always had to do as he ended up doing, all his life, though he'd rather call it his existence, or better still, his deathwards existence, everything he'd ever done had been based on nothing but this habit of studying which he'd never been able to shake off, where other people get ahead easily and often quite rapidly, he'd never gotten ahead easily or rapidly, obsessed as he was with the habit of always studying, all of him, his organism, his mind, and everything he did, determined by his habit of studying.Roithamer in Correction, Thomas Bernhard tr. Sophie Wilkins.
And Other Stories is one of the UK’s wonderful small independent publishers: they aim to publish writing that is mind-blowing, often ‘challenging’ (Maureen Freely) and ‘shamelessly literary’ (Stuart Evers) – opening a space for exploration and discovery.
As a subscriber, this novel is the 5th book from them I have read this year (albeit this was a review copy provided by the publisher), and the description given in apposite. All of the books were ones I am proud to have helped get published but some were a challenge to read (see e.g. Black Wave): these aren’t novels that are meant to sit in the reader’s comfort zone.
Sorry to Disrupt The Peace certainly fits the challenging mould, and won’t be to everyone’s taste (see other reviews) but this is one of my favourite books of 2017.
Our first-person narrator Helen was born in Korea but adopted at a young age by a white American couple in Milwaukee, who also adopted another Korean boy.
I'm sorry to disrupt the peace was my stock apology: I used it all the time at my workplace, it was a good apology because it could mean so many different things to people. It could mean, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I'm sorry, I'll ruin you.The novel opens with the 32 year-old Helen in New York, barely scraping together a living, where she receives the news that her adoptive brother (as she consistently refers to him) has committed suicide.
At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain, it depended. Long, long ago I made peace with my plainness. I made peace with piano lessons that went nowhere because I had no natural talent or aptitude for music. I made peace with the coarse black hair that grows out of my head and hangs down stiffly to my shoulders. One day I even made peace with my uterus.Helen is in reality subject to a disciplinary investigations at work – perhaps related to her purloining of the toilet supplies or her sourcing of marijuana as her personal therapeutic device her ‘troubled young people’ (another constant refrain), amongst other failings. An email to her supervisor excusing her absence is entitled "A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (NOT THE BOOK)", a nicely Knausgaardian nod, and she signs off "Sister Reliability" ("even though he refused to call me Sister Reliability, the troubled young people certainly did").
Living in New York City for five years, I had discovered the easiest way to distinguish oneself was to have a conscience or a sense of morality, since most people in Manhattan were extraordinary thieves of various standing, some of them multi-billionaires. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that it was my true calling. I made little to no money as a part-time after-school supervisor of troubled young people, with the side work of ordering paper products for the toilets. After my first week, the troubled people gave me a nickname.
Hey, Sister Reliability, what’s up? Bum me a cigarette. Suck my dick. They never stopped smoking or saying disgusting things to me, those troubled young people living and dying in Manhattan, sewer of the earth! I was living and dying right next to them all the while attempting to maintain an ethical stance as their supervisor, although some days I will admit it was difficult to tell who was supervising whom.
Highly dysfunctional she is nevertheless wonderfully self-obsessed and delusional ("I always related any given situation to myself, another of my great talents") and decides that she will go home to help her estranged parents:
I shouted things to the passers-by on the crummy sidewalks below. I can be a very helpful person! I screamed. A woman pushing a double-wide stroller looked up at me with concern. At your service, bitches! I shouted. I saluted the pigeons and the rats. I said to no one, What you are doing, Helen, is not only very ethical, it is what is required.Her ‘adoptive parents’ (again she always refers to them that way) are none to please to see her – regarding her, realistically, as more likely to be a burden than a help: she puts flowers sent for the funeral into a bucket, which proves to be filled with diluted breach and eats the cake intended for the reception afterwards. But she nevertheless embarks on her own investigation into the causes of her brother’s death, an investigation which, unsurprisingly given her personality, is as much about discovering the causes of her own unhappiness as her brother's.
[...]
I would envelop them in warmth of my charity and my supportive beam of light. I am a helpfulness virtuoso and it is time to take my talents to my childhood home.
There is a lot of autobiographical overlap with Cottrell’s own previous life (see the interview sourced below in The Guardian for the detail) and the novel is clearly grounded in his own experience and emotion, but still fictional.
The autobiographical details that overlap with the book—they’re very emotional, I was writing from a place of emotion. But I wasn’t hoping to create confusion between me and Helen. If people want to read the details of my life into the events in Helen’s, that choice has nothing to do with me. That’s the reader’s response, which is private and subjective. I’m aware I need to hold space for all different types of responses, and I’m hopeful I can do that.Source: Paris Review interview
Given this invitation to make one’s own subjective response, to me the novel was most resonant as a novel in response to the, in my view, greatest novelist of the last 50 years, Thomas Bernhard, and in particular his masterful Correction - albeit with a very different if ultimately equally tragic brother-sister relationship. In Cottrell’s own words:
Interior books are the books I prefer to spend my time with. I would venture that Thomas Bernhard is the master of interior prose. I remember sitting with Jesse Ball, who is a genius, at The School of the Art Institute in 2010 and he had Correction on the table. That moment of reading Correction and then going on to The Loser, Extinction, Concrete, Woodcutters, Frost, Gargoyles, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, all of those books changed things for me. In the opening 20 pages or so in The Loser, the narrator is standing in a doorway or in the process of entering an inn. There’s no description of his physical movement, it’s simply stated, which was exciting to me.Source: LA Review of Books
I admire Thomas Bernhard and the writers he has inspired, W. G. Sebald and Javier Marías for example. The rhythm of Bernhard’s sentences is something I want to study for the rest of my life. His narrators are repellent and misogynistic, and yet, there’s very little artifice or decoration, and in that way, they seem really pure. I dislike artificial books, books that have nice manners, books that are designed to show off the writer’s ease with developing characters, settings, et cetera. Those books work well as doorstoppers, I think, or you can use them to press flowers or whatever. I have a list of voice-driven novels that I turn to when I forget how to write. Some of the books on that list: Nobody is Ever Missing, By Night in Chile, Fra Keeler, The Face of Another, The Rings of Saturn. My favorite interior novels are written from a feeling of desperation and urgency.
Helen’s one brief moment of success, as a performance artist, was ended by accusations of plagiarism, but she justifies her approach to herself:
A side-by-side comparison of my work to the world of Connell and Darger showed certain similar technical flourishes and extensions, and although it was easy to see am unabashed and perhaps uncritical admiration, my found texts and assemblages were not exact copies, my intention had been to participate in the conversation, not to reproduce what had already been produced.The writing in this first-person account has a similar approach, drawing heavily on the patterns of other authors, notably Thomas Bernhard but also Kafka and Lispector, sometimes appropriating their turns-of-phrase directly as in the quote that opens the review (Cottrell provides the references at the back that Helen omits).
And Cottrell's prose is full of wonderful black comedy:
I pictured the funeral, that great spectacle of mourning. I saw strangers standing around taking part in a superficial grief performance ostensibly to both celebrate and mourn a dead person they never bothered to know when he was alive.Or, as Helen travels from the airport to her childhood home, in the evening gloom, her fond recall of her childhood home is typically bleak:
I saw in my head the nunnery where all the nuns died and the priests took over, the pharmacy that houses a child pornography ring, the bird sanctuary where a governmental agency collects the geese to feed to wolves.One striking theme is Helen and her brother’s situation. As I write the review today the English newspapers headlines relate in typically scandalised tones the story of a English girl fostered by a devout Muslim family (“Christian girl, 5, is forced into foster care with Burka-wearing Muslim carers who 'took away her crucifix and stopped her eating bacon”, Daily Mail) – but I suspect the same papers would praise Helen’s adoptive parents for making her integrate:
When [my adoptive father] played Mozart or Schubert the house filled up with white male European culture. We were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once I went to college, I stopped. There is a world and history of non white culture, I wrote to them once in a furious letter. And you kept us in the dark our entire childhood! The two white people raised their Asian children to think Asian art was decorative: Oriental jugs and vases! Jade elephants! Enamel chopsticks!The final straw for her is her first communion ("stupid white bitches getting married to God!") although she has no interest in finding her real mother, unlike her adoptive brother. Indeed when her ‘investigation’ is abruptly resolved by finding a suicide note of sorts left by her brother explaining everything, a note her parents were aware of had she but have asked them rather than pursue her own course, his search for his own roots proves to have played a key role.
Ultimately a blackly comic, emotionally moving and highly literary novel – strongly recommended.
Sources:
LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/p...
Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
December 24, 2016
Add Patty Yumi Cottrell to my list of favorite writers right now! Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is so engrossing and well-balanced, the way it blends the dark world of private depression and alarming humor reminds me of Miriam Toews or the films of Noah Baumbach. I'm sort of at a loss for words on how much I love this book and the narrator's prickly investigation of her brother's suicide. I don't want to say too much or too little, but I doubt I'll read a better book next year (this novel comes out in March). It's amazing.
December 15, 2017
RE-READ AS NOW INCLUDED ON THE EXCELLENT REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE LONG LIST.
I imagine this book will divide opinion. I think that those who loved last year’s Man Booker listed Eileen will also love this. And those who hated Eileen (that includes me) will also hate this. I didn’t like it at all, I’m afraid. In fact, apart from the two protagonists being different nationalities, this book is almost Eileen 2. And that is not a good thing.
Let’s start with the title. Unfortunately, "Sorry To Disrupt The Peace" had a very similar ring to it as "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" which is another Booker listed book that I really didn’t like. I liked the picture on the cover, but I didn’t like the title.
Once I started reading, I knew things weren’t going well when I found myself highlighting passages purely and simply because I didn’t like them. By the time I had highlighted
I began to worry my roommate Julie would walk in and see me staining her new pillows with the fluids of my grieving.
and then
My brain was working very hard inside the housing of its skull.
and then
I was curious about the abyss. The abyss, round and dark as a child’s mouth.
and I was still only on page 9, I worked out that this book and I weren’t going to get on well together.
Our protagonist is Helen Moran and the book starts when she learns that her brother (they are both adopted from different parents, so he is actually not a blood relative in any way) has died. The story is her trying to piece together what has happened. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that Helen has some psychological issues, so the book becomes an uncomfortable read. I found it particularly uncomfortable because I didn’t like it but felt guilty for judging someone who clearly is struggling mentally.
There are a few pages towards the end of the book where Helen’s brother makes a sort of retrospective appearance and these are actually quite moving. But they are not enough to redeem the book which contains far to much vomiting, shitting, menstruating and masturbation for my tastes.
Bizarrely, it also contains a lot of Fiona Apple. I thought I was the only person in the world to own a Fiona Apple CD (I haven’t listened to it for a long time, I have to say).
Fortunately, it is a short book so I didn’t waste too much time on it. As I say, I think there will be a lot of people (those who liked Eileen) who will rave about this book. But it really didn’t work for me.
My thanks to the publisher, And Other Stories, for a copy of this book.
I imagine this book will divide opinion. I think that those who loved last year’s Man Booker listed Eileen will also love this. And those who hated Eileen (that includes me) will also hate this. I didn’t like it at all, I’m afraid. In fact, apart from the two protagonists being different nationalities, this book is almost Eileen 2. And that is not a good thing.
Let’s start with the title. Unfortunately, "Sorry To Disrupt The Peace" had a very similar ring to it as "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" which is another Booker listed book that I really didn’t like. I liked the picture on the cover, but I didn’t like the title.
Once I started reading, I knew things weren’t going well when I found myself highlighting passages purely and simply because I didn’t like them. By the time I had highlighted
I began to worry my roommate Julie would walk in and see me staining her new pillows with the fluids of my grieving.
and then
My brain was working very hard inside the housing of its skull.
and then
I was curious about the abyss. The abyss, round and dark as a child’s mouth.
and I was still only on page 9, I worked out that this book and I weren’t going to get on well together.
Our protagonist is Helen Moran and the book starts when she learns that her brother (they are both adopted from different parents, so he is actually not a blood relative in any way) has died. The story is her trying to piece together what has happened. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that Helen has some psychological issues, so the book becomes an uncomfortable read. I found it particularly uncomfortable because I didn’t like it but felt guilty for judging someone who clearly is struggling mentally.
There are a few pages towards the end of the book where Helen’s brother makes a sort of retrospective appearance and these are actually quite moving. But they are not enough to redeem the book which contains far to much vomiting, shitting, menstruating and masturbation for my tastes.
Bizarrely, it also contains a lot of Fiona Apple. I thought I was the only person in the world to own a Fiona Apple CD (I haven’t listened to it for a long time, I have to say).
Fortunately, it is a short book so I didn’t waste too much time on it. As I say, I think there will be a lot of people (those who liked Eileen) who will rave about this book. But it really didn’t work for me.
My thanks to the publisher, And Other Stories, for a copy of this book.
March 23, 2017
When Helen Moran learns of her adoptive brother's suicide, she returns home to her adoptive parents for the first time in years and launches her own metaphysical investigation into his suicide.
What you need to understand here is that Helen is one of the oddest characters you will ever encounter. No amount of explanation could properly convey just how strange and quirky she is. To be inside her brain for 263 pages is an experience—an experience that I happened to love, though not all readers will.
But the thing is that beneath Helen's amusing strangeness and her frankly inappropriate way of dealing with everything lies some extremely poignant truths.
When someone you know commits suicide there's this underlying need to find out why. But the thing is that it's not always that straightforward. And in situations where it's unexpected, you find yourself feeling deeply distraught by a sudden realization that this person you cared about had been concealing an unfathomably deep well of despair unseen by those around them. It makes you stop and wonder about how much you can ever really know about anyone, and it's a profoundly sad feeling in so many ways.
I've known this feeling, and Patty Yumi Cottrell addressed it so interestingly and accurately in this book, employing absurdity and bleak humor as a vehicle to confront such concrete sadness.
Helen, unlike many of us, does eventually found the "why" she's looking for. And it adds a whole new layer of depth and melancholy beauty to this moving debut.
What you need to understand here is that Helen is one of the oddest characters you will ever encounter. No amount of explanation could properly convey just how strange and quirky she is. To be inside her brain for 263 pages is an experience—an experience that I happened to love, though not all readers will.
But the thing is that beneath Helen's amusing strangeness and her frankly inappropriate way of dealing with everything lies some extremely poignant truths.
When someone you know commits suicide there's this underlying need to find out why. But the thing is that it's not always that straightforward. And in situations where it's unexpected, you find yourself feeling deeply distraught by a sudden realization that this person you cared about had been concealing an unfathomably deep well of despair unseen by those around them. It makes you stop and wonder about how much you can ever really know about anyone, and it's a profoundly sad feeling in so many ways.
I've known this feeling, and Patty Yumi Cottrell addressed it so interestingly and accurately in this book, employing absurdity and bleak humor as a vehicle to confront such concrete sadness.
Helen, unlike many of us, does eventually found the "why" she's looking for. And it adds a whole new layer of depth and melancholy beauty to this moving debut.
November 27, 2018
Helen Moran introduces herself as a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. When I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. She wears clothes she finds in bins or left in the street, and her favourite word seems to be 'disgusting'. In her own opinion, she is a genius at being ethical. Her internal monologue is peppered with exclamation marks and swear words; she frequently announces things aloud to empty rooms. She envisions grief as a European man in his forties, average build and height, balding, with a red nose. 'Sorry to disrupt the peace', she explains, is her 'stock apology': it could mean so many different things to people. It could mean, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I'm sorry, I'll ruin you, bitch.
I was about halfway through Sorry to Disrupt the Peace when I realised who Helen reminded me of: Ottessa Moshfegh's eponymous Eileen. It's her distorted view of herself; the way she's prudish and perverted at the same time; the anger that explodes from her narrative at intervals; even her job, working with 'troubled young people' (she always uses this phrase), is similar. The weirdness and squalor of Helen's surroundings, for example the filthy state of her family home, also reminded me of Moshfegh's writing. Here are a couple of quotes that struck me as particularly Eileenesque in their rage and disconcerting frankness:
Funny, sad, bizarre and unexpectedly tender. A fantastic debut, and a voice I won't forget.
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I was about halfway through Sorry to Disrupt the Peace when I realised who Helen reminded me of: Ottessa Moshfegh's eponymous Eileen. It's her distorted view of herself; the way she's prudish and perverted at the same time; the anger that explodes from her narrative at intervals; even her job, working with 'troubled young people' (she always uses this phrase), is similar. The weirdness and squalor of Helen's surroundings, for example the filthy state of her family home, also reminded me of Moshfegh's writing. Here are a couple of quotes that struck me as particularly Eileenesque in their rage and disconcerting frankness:
I was fine with genitalia in my face and blow jobs and spitting out their sperm, I was fine with rimming, I made my peace with it, and I was so angry. Underneath my peace there was an anger, an ugly anger, the force of it was formidable, and I was the one who had to live with it. Everything was bitter.Helen is living in Manhattan when she finds out her adoptive brother has committed suicide. (Helen is also adopted, and she and her brother are both Korean by birth, though not biologically related.) She has such a bad relationship with her adoptive parents that she hears the news not from them, but from an uncle she barely knows; nevertheless, she immediately decides to go home to Milwaukee to 'support' them. There, she starts what she calls a metaphysical investigation into what happened to her brother, following clues found in his room and interviewing his friends.
I've always identified with the victims, I identified with the underdogs, the colonised, the beggars and peasants, the bacteria in the sponge, the mosquitoes and the ants. I would get my revenge one day. Revenge on whom? someone might ask. I'll show you, I said to no one.
I have always preferred to be in the background, an extra in the movie of my own life, but if people had to look at me at the funeral ceremony, at least I would be wearing a black turtleneck, which would convey a sense of mystery of the abyss.As with many eccentric characters, we learn as much about Helen from the things she inadvertently lets slip and from others' reactions to her – often either horrified or concerned – as we do from her own words. When she bumps into the parents of one of her brother's friends, the father says It's not good to talk like this. You're upsetting her. Look at yourself, and it isn't clear whether he's talking to his wife or to Helen. When her own parents respond to her behaviour, there often seems to be a dissonance that points to Helen's unreliability, her warped perception. It works the other way, too: Helen's many eccentricities make it close to unbelievable that she's ever managed to hold down a job and live with a roommate.
Why wouldn't anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?So central is Helen's voice to this novel that I kept forgetting to care about the supposed plot, the 'mystery' of her brother's suicide. That was going to be my main criticism. But this thread is beautifully tied up in the last few chapters, as the veil of Helen's quirks is finally lifted to properly explore her grief and her brother's depression in a uniquely sensitive treatment of suicide.
Funny, sad, bizarre and unexpectedly tender. A fantastic debut, and a voice I won't forget.
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June 9, 2017
I never read reviews before I start a book. I usually glance at the rating just to make sure a book isn't total crap, but I like to make up my own mind about a book as I read it. Were I to see the reviews, I feel I would be unduly influenced by others' thoughts.
Here's the problem: now that I've finished the book and I've scanned quite a few reviews, I have to wonder if we all read the same novel. Hilarious? Funny? Not even a whisper of a giggle escaped me as I read this. It's obvious that Helen is suffering from some sort of mental illness, and laughing at her quirks seems to be laughing at her illness, which is just too mean-spirited to me. It's not even dark humor, so I'm rather unclear how people find this story so amusing.
It's not that I don't care for unreliable characters. I absolutely loved Gone Girl with every fiber of my book-loving soul, which has a most unreliable narrator. But I think the difference between Gone Girl and this book is I feel like the former has a plot with action; the reader keeps turning the page to see if what she's being told is reality or just another untruth. Cottrell's novel discusses Helen's search for why her brother took his own life, but it's more of a series of unrelated and awful occurrences that Helen tends to cause. Nothing really stuck with me even after finishing it; I know I read the whole thing, but it didn't say anything to me.
It's possible I'm just not "hip" enough to get this book, and I'm totally okay with that. Your mileage may vary.
Here's the problem: now that I've finished the book and I've scanned quite a few reviews, I have to wonder if we all read the same novel. Hilarious? Funny? Not even a whisper of a giggle escaped me as I read this. It's obvious that Helen is suffering from some sort of mental illness, and laughing at her quirks seems to be laughing at her illness, which is just too mean-spirited to me. It's not even dark humor, so I'm rather unclear how people find this story so amusing.
It's not that I don't care for unreliable characters. I absolutely loved Gone Girl with every fiber of my book-loving soul, which has a most unreliable narrator. But I think the difference between Gone Girl and this book is I feel like the former has a plot with action; the reader keeps turning the page to see if what she's being told is reality or just another untruth. Cottrell's novel discusses Helen's search for why her brother took his own life, but it's more of a series of unrelated and awful occurrences that Helen tends to cause. Nothing really stuck with me even after finishing it; I know I read the whole thing, but it didn't say anything to me.
It's possible I'm just not "hip" enough to get this book, and I'm totally okay with that. Your mileage may vary.
April 9, 2017
I have this thing about McSweeney's, right. A lot of you know this about me. I do not like McSweeney's and Dave Eggers is to blame for it. But that's not really the point here other than to say that because of the McSweeney's connection, I almost didn't read this book at all. But my friend asked me to, and I am more than happy to oblige in any reading requests.
For a debut novel, this is pretty good, actually. I think we all know the smell of a lot of debut novels, and how they all read like they came straight out of a creative writing workshop. I can say that this does not read that way, so in that sense it is totally refreshing.
Helen Moran is in her early 30s when she receives the news that her younger adoptive brother kills himself. She has long been removed from her family (by choice), but now she realizes she needs/wants to know why her adoptive brother took his own life. She knows going home to Milwaukee (from NYC) will be difficult - going home always is, but even more so when you're estranged from your family. But her desire to understand ("investigate", as Helen puts it throughout the book) overrules her discomfort at seeing her adoptive parents again.
Helen herself is a really uncomfortable character. She's not a very good person, so if you're one of those readers who thinks a character has to be likable for a book to be good, let me be possibly the first to tell you that you will not like this book. She is not likable. But then you meet her adoptive parents and it's like "Oh, well, okay, now it's starting to make sense." They are also pretty disgusting and despicable characters, so you won't get much relief once they come on the scene.
What I like about this is Helen is an unreliable narrator. This is one of the times when an unreliable narrator works exceptionally well. She doesn't have nice things to say about, well, anyone, but she also doesn't have nice things to say about herself, so it's almost sort of forgivable just how shitty she is. She has made poor choices much of her life - at least the parts of her life she allows the reader to know about. Is Helen really this repugnant, or does she dislike herself so much that she wants us (the readers) to think that she is? Is it an emotional need to push everyone away who might get close to her? There are so many possibilities here.
And that's where the story really works all around. The unreliable narrator aspect makes for an ambiguous story all around. Helen doesn't like anyone, but if there's one person she might have had a shred of respect for, it seems to have been her adoptive brother. And even that's questionable at times.
There are a couple of aspects that come up throughout the novel that a bit too heavy-handed - the waterfall being one (also seen on the cover for extra impact) and the phrase "sorry to disrupt the peace." The first couple of references to each were alright, understandable, kind of cool, as it usually is whenever you find the part of any book where the title and/or cover suddenly make sense. But then after a while it became too much, kind of like these things sometimes do in first novels. If there's anything that comes across as too "creative writing workshop"y, this would be it.
The way the author writes about Helen (or any of the characters) reminds me of Gillian Flynn's writing, though even more raw, if that's a thing. This isn't the next Gone Girl or anything, but there's a similarity between Flynn and Cottrell in how they write their characters. These are characters you want to know more about, even if you can't entirely trust them, but you love to dislike them throughout the process.
I look forward to seeing what Cottrell brings us in the future. Not saying the pressure is on, but the sophomore novel is usually great strides ahead of a debut novel, and I can't wait to see how Cottrell will top this. Or if we'll like her characters any more than we did here.
Cottrell's name seems to be on all the lists right now, which means people are pricking up their ears and listening. It also means she probably sold her entire soul tothe devil McSweeney's, but hey, if they're going to go through the effort to promote her and her name, then more power to her.
LitHub interview
For a debut novel, this is pretty good, actually. I think we all know the smell of a lot of debut novels, and how they all read like they came straight out of a creative writing workshop. I can say that this does not read that way, so in that sense it is totally refreshing.
Helen Moran is in her early 30s when she receives the news that her younger adoptive brother kills himself. She has long been removed from her family (by choice), but now she realizes she needs/wants to know why her adoptive brother took his own life. She knows going home to Milwaukee (from NYC) will be difficult - going home always is, but even more so when you're estranged from your family. But her desire to understand ("investigate", as Helen puts it throughout the book) overrules her discomfort at seeing her adoptive parents again.
Helen herself is a really uncomfortable character. She's not a very good person, so if you're one of those readers who thinks a character has to be likable for a book to be good, let me be possibly the first to tell you that you will not like this book. She is not likable. But then you meet her adoptive parents and it's like "Oh, well, okay, now it's starting to make sense." They are also pretty disgusting and despicable characters, so you won't get much relief once they come on the scene.
What I like about this is Helen is an unreliable narrator. This is one of the times when an unreliable narrator works exceptionally well. She doesn't have nice things to say about, well, anyone, but she also doesn't have nice things to say about herself, so it's almost sort of forgivable just how shitty she is. She has made poor choices much of her life - at least the parts of her life she allows the reader to know about. Is Helen really this repugnant, or does she dislike herself so much that she wants us (the readers) to think that she is? Is it an emotional need to push everyone away who might get close to her? There are so many possibilities here.
And that's where the story really works all around. The unreliable narrator aspect makes for an ambiguous story all around. Helen doesn't like anyone, but if there's one person she might have had a shred of respect for, it seems to have been her adoptive brother. And even that's questionable at times.
There are a couple of aspects that come up throughout the novel that a bit too heavy-handed - the waterfall being one (also seen on the cover for extra impact) and the phrase "sorry to disrupt the peace." The first couple of references to each were alright, understandable, kind of cool, as it usually is whenever you find the part of any book where the title and/or cover suddenly make sense. But then after a while it became too much, kind of like these things sometimes do in first novels. If there's anything that comes across as too "creative writing workshop"y, this would be it.
The way the author writes about Helen (or any of the characters) reminds me of Gillian Flynn's writing, though even more raw, if that's a thing. This isn't the next Gone Girl or anything, but there's a similarity between Flynn and Cottrell in how they write their characters. These are characters you want to know more about, even if you can't entirely trust them, but you love to dislike them throughout the process.
I look forward to seeing what Cottrell brings us in the future. Not saying the pressure is on, but the sophomore novel is usually great strides ahead of a debut novel, and I can't wait to see how Cottrell will top this. Or if we'll like her characters any more than we did here.
Cottrell's name seems to be on all the lists right now, which means people are pricking up their ears and listening. It also means she probably sold her entire soul to
LitHub interview
January 29, 2018
RE-READ DUE TO ITS LONGLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
And Other Stories is a publisher set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company, which aims to be a home for collaboration and “works on the principle that great new books will be heard about and read thanks to the combined intelligence of a number of people: editors, readers, translators, critics, literary promoters and academics”.
“Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” was first published in the US by Dave Eggers’s McSweeney publishing.
Helen and her brother are Korean children (from different families) adopted by a catholic couple in Milwaukee. The story is set over a few days after Helen is called to say her brother has committed suicide and decides to head home both to comfort her parents and investigate the motives behind his actions.
Helen broke off contact with her family year’s previously and after dropping into and then out of the alternative art scene in her home City moves to New York where she lives off things she salvages or steals and works as an “after-school supervisor for troubled young people“, a role she performs very inappropriately (giving the children sweets and drugs, meeting them off-duty).
Helen introduces herself
Helen is clearly an interesting character – later on (in his suicide note) she finds that her brother believes “she might be an undiagnosed bipolar or schizophrenic” - albeit this is never confirmed, however its clear that others are wary around her and her family are amazed to hear she is apparently supervising others.
I did not howrver find her an appealing character though. Unfortunately, with her fundamental amorality, obsessions with her body and bodily functions, and unreliable narration (fuelled by a complete lack not so much of empathy as self-awareness) I felt I was in Eileen territory (easily the weakest novel on last year’s Booker shortlist).
Interestingly since completing my review I have found that the author's reward to herself for completing this novel was to allow herself to read "Eileen" - the fact she had this as a reward probably shows that I am never really going to be the author's target readership.
Equally however I have engaged with many other readers of the book, whose views I hugely respect who have loved the character of Helen and the humour in the book.
Some of Helen’s character we are implicitly lead to believe by her first party narration, comes from her upbringing, her strict Catholic parents lacking emotional engagement with her, denying her Asian heritage. However her fundamental unreliability as a narrator (and tendency to embellish the faults and actions of others, while simultaneously minimising or trivialising her own behaviours) causes us to doubt the veracity of her account.
I found myself sympathising with the “of course” and substituting “book” for “house” when she says
Ultimately my reaction to this book, echoes that of Thomas, a friend of her brother’s who tries to engage with her around his reaction to the suicide, but just finds himself repelled by the tales Helen feels she has to share with him
If however you are a fan of Eileen or of Thomas Bernhard's provocative writing, you will very likely hugely enjoy this book and although at times you may not feel well, you will want to stick around for a gut wrenching (thankfully in an emotional not scatalogical sense) ending which sheds new light on Helen's brother's decision and by extension on what may drive Helen's behaviour.
Please read some other reviews, buy this direct from the publishers and ultimately form your own view.
With thanks to And Other Stories for a review copy.
And Other Stories is a publisher set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company, which aims to be a home for collaboration and “works on the principle that great new books will be heard about and read thanks to the combined intelligence of a number of people: editors, readers, translators, critics, literary promoters and academics”.
“Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” was first published in the US by Dave Eggers’s McSweeney publishing.
Helen and her brother are Korean children (from different families) adopted by a catholic couple in Milwaukee. The story is set over a few days after Helen is called to say her brother has committed suicide and decides to head home both to comfort her parents and investigate the motives behind his actions.
Helen broke off contact with her family year’s previously and after dropping into and then out of the alternative art scene in her home City moves to New York where she lives off things she salvages or steals and works as an “after-school supervisor for troubled young people“, a role she performs very inappropriately (giving the children sweets and drugs, meeting them off-duty).
Helen introduces herself
At the time of his death, I was a thirty-two-year old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating …… If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain …………. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that was my true calling
Helen is clearly an interesting character – later on (in his suicide note) she finds that her brother believes “she might be an undiagnosed bipolar or schizophrenic” - albeit this is never confirmed, however its clear that others are wary around her and her family are amazed to hear she is apparently supervising others.
I did not howrver find her an appealing character though. Unfortunately, with her fundamental amorality, obsessions with her body and bodily functions, and unreliable narration (fuelled by a complete lack not so much of empathy as self-awareness) I felt I was in Eileen territory (easily the weakest novel on last year’s Booker shortlist).
Interestingly since completing my review I have found that the author's reward to herself for completing this novel was to allow herself to read "Eileen" - the fact she had this as a reward probably shows that I am never really going to be the author's target readership.
Equally however I have engaged with many other readers of the book, whose views I hugely respect who have loved the character of Helen and the humour in the book.
Some of Helen’s character we are implicitly lead to believe by her first party narration, comes from her upbringing, her strict Catholic parents lacking emotional engagement with her, denying her Asian heritage. However her fundamental unreliability as a narrator (and tendency to embellish the faults and actions of others, while simultaneously minimising or trivialising her own behaviours) causes us to doubt the veracity of her account.
I found myself sympathising with the “of course” and substituting “book” for “house” when she says
I was chewing the apple thoughtfully when I bit into something soft with a very fine granular texture. I spat it out into my hand: pieces of black worm. Of course the apples in my adoptive parent’s refrigarator would be mealy and filled up with worms .. it made perfect sense for this disgusting house
Ultimately my reaction to this book, echoes that of Thomas, a friend of her brother’s who tries to engage with her around his reaction to the suicide, but just finds himself repelled by the tales Helen feels she has to share with him
Thomas looked down to the floor. He no longer looked sad and allergic, in fact, he looked upset, and I recognize immediately a face of disgust ……..
Is something bothering you? I said.
Well its just I don’t understand why you had to tell me all of that. What did any of that have to do with …….. anything?
Wait a second. I’m not done. I didn’t even get to the good part, there’s more
I should get going. I don’t feel very well
If however you are a fan of Eileen or of Thomas Bernhard's provocative writing, you will very likely hugely enjoy this book and although at times you may not feel well, you will want to stick around for a gut wrenching (thankfully in an emotional not scatalogical sense) ending which sheds new light on Helen's brother's decision and by extension on what may drive Helen's behaviour.
Please read some other reviews, buy this direct from the publishers and ultimately form your own view.
With thanks to And Other Stories for a review copy.
October 16, 2016
This is a book that I'm sad to have finished because I became so attached to the narrator, to her outlook and circumstances. Though it spans only the space of a few days, the reader gets so much. Helen Moran is awful and wonderful and completely relatable. This is a book everyone should read.
April 17, 2017
VOICE VOICE VOICE VOICE! Cottrell does many things right in this book but what completely blew my mind was the VOICE! Helen Moran is a uniquely fucked up and weird person and when her younger adoptive brother commits suicide she decides to investigate his death. Cottrell blends the darkly depressing with the humanely hilarious in this excellent book. So weird, so good!
December 25, 2017
A polarizing book among my GR cognoscenti, and nominated for the Republic of Consciousness prize - both of which impelled me to read it. Some have compared it to the Booker-nominated 'Eileen' which I loathed, but which I can also understand, since both are narrated by rather disturbed young women going through some rather harrowing experiences. But it reminded me more of 'The Vegetarian', perhaps because of the Korean connection, but also because of the emphasis on a rejection of the body and the rather stilted prose; even though this was WRITTEN in English, it somehow felt 'translated' from another language to me at times. I wound up kind of in the middle on this one though - it certainly kept my attention and I finished it quickly, but I can't say I really ENJOYED it all that much. A bit too dark and depressing for my taste.
October 28, 2016
Some Thoughts & Tangents On Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
“Helen Moran, are you mad? I should have asked myself. Helen Moran, I should have cried out, are you an insane monster?” (16)
I laughed out loud like I was an insane monster after reading the above sentence. This novel is filled with such comically tragic moments I found myself laughing out loud a lot. I was so startled by Helen’s revelations, by her directness, by the fact that I found all her actions & inactions perfectly reasonable. If Hamlet had been interesting I imagine he would be more like Helen Moran. I want to time travel & lend Thomas Bernhard a copy of this & shout SEE HERE THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE BITCH.
Not enough stars.
Absurd & mysterious & immediate—there’s not time to think about the landscape or events, there’s only the story we are right-there-in, with Helen Moran, we’re listening and participating in the drama with her. It’s uncomfortable & tender & I couldn’t look away. It seems somehow eerie that another Helen has found & absorbed me so fervently, after spending the summer with HD’s Helen and Alice Notley’s Helen, I thought I’d met the last of any Helen I might care about. I think to myself will I ever escape Helen. And really, here, I don’t want that escape. I want to be in Helen Moran’s thoughts forever.
Joining the ranks of illustrious, exiled, hated & beloved, beautiful, beautiful, sacred & profane Helen, is Helen Moran. I’ve been thinking a lot about “the kind of action women participate in,” as Notley says, “at night in sleep, or deep in their psyches, when they tell themselves secret stories about their lives, when they tell themselves stories almost without knowing” they’re telling those stories. Patty Yumi Cottrell has the ability to make you be in those stories. If the perfect sentences, visceral imagination, & engrossing personality of Cottrell’s Helen doesn’t convince you to read this book, then perhaps an affection for the awkward & perverse & precise will persuade you. This book is seriously fuck awesome. You want to read it.
“Helen Moran, are you mad? I should have asked myself. Helen Moran, I should have cried out, are you an insane monster?” (16)
I laughed out loud like I was an insane monster after reading the above sentence. This novel is filled with such comically tragic moments I found myself laughing out loud a lot. I was so startled by Helen’s revelations, by her directness, by the fact that I found all her actions & inactions perfectly reasonable. If Hamlet had been interesting I imagine he would be more like Helen Moran. I want to time travel & lend Thomas Bernhard a copy of this & shout SEE HERE THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE BITCH.
Not enough stars.
Absurd & mysterious & immediate—there’s not time to think about the landscape or events, there’s only the story we are right-there-in, with Helen Moran, we’re listening and participating in the drama with her. It’s uncomfortable & tender & I couldn’t look away. It seems somehow eerie that another Helen has found & absorbed me so fervently, after spending the summer with HD’s Helen and Alice Notley’s Helen, I thought I’d met the last of any Helen I might care about. I think to myself will I ever escape Helen. And really, here, I don’t want that escape. I want to be in Helen Moran’s thoughts forever.
Joining the ranks of illustrious, exiled, hated & beloved, beautiful, beautiful, sacred & profane Helen, is Helen Moran. I’ve been thinking a lot about “the kind of action women participate in,” as Notley says, “at night in sleep, or deep in their psyches, when they tell themselves secret stories about their lives, when they tell themselves stories almost without knowing” they’re telling those stories. Patty Yumi Cottrell has the ability to make you be in those stories. If the perfect sentences, visceral imagination, & engrossing personality of Cottrell’s Helen doesn’t convince you to read this book, then perhaps an affection for the awkward & perverse & precise will persuade you. This book is seriously fuck awesome. You want to read it.
January 31, 2018
I decided to read this book after its inclusion on the longlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
Helen Moran is Korean by birth, the adopted daughter of a white family in Milwaukee. One day, she receives a telephone call telling her that her adoptive brother has committed suicide. She decides to return to her adoptive parents’ home to try to find out what drove her brother to this.
As the book unfolds, Helen reveals herself to be rather an odd and not especially likeable character, with somewhat questionable ethics and personal hygiene habits! Her family don’t seem very pleased to see her and she causes a number of calamities in pursuance of her investigations, so we come to realise that Helen is something of a difficult person to get along with.
There is plenty of black humour in this novel, which I imagine wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste, especially given the subject matter. I thought it would be a 3 star read for me until the last few chapters, which I thought were so wonderful I almost went for 5 stars.
I think Patty Yumi Cottrell is definitely an author to watch. “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” is strange, occasionally offensive, but oddly charming. I am glad I read it and I hope it makes the Republic of Consciousness Prize shortlist.
Helen Moran is Korean by birth, the adopted daughter of a white family in Milwaukee. One day, she receives a telephone call telling her that her adoptive brother has committed suicide. She decides to return to her adoptive parents’ home to try to find out what drove her brother to this.
As the book unfolds, Helen reveals herself to be rather an odd and not especially likeable character, with somewhat questionable ethics and personal hygiene habits! Her family don’t seem very pleased to see her and she causes a number of calamities in pursuance of her investigations, so we come to realise that Helen is something of a difficult person to get along with.
There is plenty of black humour in this novel, which I imagine wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste, especially given the subject matter. I thought it would be a 3 star read for me until the last few chapters, which I thought were so wonderful I almost went for 5 stars.
I think Patty Yumi Cottrell is definitely an author to watch. “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace” is strange, occasionally offensive, but oddly charming. I am glad I read it and I hope it makes the Republic of Consciousness Prize shortlist.
June 21, 2017
Patty Yumi Cottrell is one to look out for.
Review to come.
Review to come.
January 29, 2018
Helen Moran, the narrator and central character of this book is unremittingly acerbic, disdainful, unforgiving. She is a really well drawn character whose unapologetic approach to her own life hisses with vitriol and suspicion.
There's dollops of black humour too.
Literature isn't as well populated by narrators whose primary response to colleagues, and family, is one which has no sense of conformity with the norm, and manners.
So far, so good.
Helen Moran is an edgy, uncomfortable character who kept my interest throughout.
There is an obvious recent example of this characterisation, and that's the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen.
If you liked that, you should like this, and vice versa.
My reservations about Sorry to Disrupt The Peace are the supporting cast, and the ending.
The final paragraph is one of the most disappointing final paragraphs I've read. For the first time Cottrell tries to make a serious point, without the humour and it's flat and an unsatisfactory sign off.
The other characters in Sorry to Disrupt The Peace, Helen's parents, her flat mate, the classes she managed/ taught, even her brother, don't have enough detail to provide the necessary structure for Helen's monologues.
and what on earth does the "balding European man" represent?
There are plenty of great examples, though, of habits, and observations, which jointly horrify and amuse; Cotterell's use of black humour given that the tragic matter of death, of suicide, is the focal point of the book, is excellent:
on a new sweater bought to go to a funeral:
I decided I would sleep in it, which would cut down on the time it would take to get ready in the morning(227)!!!!!!!!!
The day I received the news of my adoptive brother's death, I also received a brand new couch from IKEA(1)
I pulled open the curtains and a filthy gray light entered. When the light entered, I shut the curtains. Then opened them. Then shut them. Then opened. Then shut. Then opened. Then shut. Then opened. I was finally in a good place, I thought, mentally and emotionally(118)
he told me to keep my eyes out for a bouquet of flowers from an award - winning florist(260)
One thing about this book that I hadn't come across before, and I liked, was the use of a side bar number to reference notes (quotations) listed at the end of the book.
So for those many many funny cameo observations it's a book well worth a quick read:
There's dollops of black humour too.
Literature isn't as well populated by narrators whose primary response to colleagues, and family, is one which has no sense of conformity with the norm, and manners.
So far, so good.
Helen Moran is an edgy, uncomfortable character who kept my interest throughout.
There is an obvious recent example of this characterisation, and that's the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen.
If you liked that, you should like this, and vice versa.
My reservations about Sorry to Disrupt The Peace are the supporting cast, and the ending.
The final paragraph is one of the most disappointing final paragraphs I've read. For the first time Cottrell tries to make a serious point, without the humour and it's flat and an unsatisfactory sign off.
The other characters in Sorry to Disrupt The Peace, Helen's parents, her flat mate, the classes she managed/ taught, even her brother, don't have enough detail to provide the necessary structure for Helen's monologues.
and what on earth does the "balding European man" represent?
There are plenty of great examples, though, of habits, and observations, which jointly horrify and amuse; Cotterell's use of black humour given that the tragic matter of death, of suicide, is the focal point of the book, is excellent:
on a new sweater bought to go to a funeral:
I decided I would sleep in it, which would cut down on the time it would take to get ready in the morning(227)!!!!!!!!!
The day I received the news of my adoptive brother's death, I also received a brand new couch from IKEA(1)
I pulled open the curtains and a filthy gray light entered. When the light entered, I shut the curtains. Then opened them. Then shut them. Then opened. Then shut. Then opened. Then shut. Then opened. I was finally in a good place, I thought, mentally and emotionally(118)
he told me to keep my eyes out for a bouquet of flowers from an award - winning florist(260)
One thing about this book that I hadn't come across before, and I liked, was the use of a side bar number to reference notes (quotations) listed at the end of the book.
So for those many many funny cameo observations it's a book well worth a quick read:
August 11, 2018
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell is one of the debut novels being highlighted by the Ink and Paper book club this year. The main character Helen Moran returns home after her brother's suicide in an attempt to figure out how he "fell into the abyss". It is clear early on that there is something not quite right with Helen leaving the reader curious as to how much this psychosis is responsible for the estrangement between her and her adoptive family. Dark humor abounds in this text. I don't know how Cottrell manages to get the reader to laugh with such a somber topic. Unlike most books on the topic of suicide the mystery of why her brother took his life is finally revealed. Perhaps the most heart touching point in the book, I felt tingles as my body warmed from the inside out. Thanks Russell from Ink and Paper Blog. I'm looking forward to reading more debuts with you this year.
September 2, 2017
There were certainly moments where I thought about setting the book down, because reading about bodily fluids and solids generally crosses a line for me. However, I have to say that I'm glad I kept reading. This book was certainly dark, disturbing and in poor taste at times, but it's also very funny and a fascinating read. What a surprise! ( I had to read this when I saw Paul and Neil at opposite ends of the spectrum. I think I ended up somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't put it down. Thanks to my GR friends for that!)
June 5, 2017
Stupendously good -- a weirdly comic novel about suicide, with pitch-black humor -- like a harowing story of grief and loss held up to a funhouse mirror. Addresses both suicide and adoption in singular, surprising ways; and with writing that is superb, daring, perverse, and highly enjoyable, reminds me of both Nabokov's Lolita and Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen. Seriously can't wait to read everything Patty Yumi Cottrell is going to write.
April 2, 2017
While the protagonist was intriguing, I kept thinking, "Shut up, already" in response to her long winded thoughts, which had a frantic, chattering feel to them. The book put me on edge and as much as I wanted to like it, I couldn't.
December 10, 2019
A cover blurb by Amelia Gray says, "Beckett fans will find a familiar, but Patty Yumi Cottrell's voice is her very own."
I couldn't put it better. I love Beckett, did find a familiar, and the voice is the reason to read this rather bleak novel.
After recently reading two bleak novels in a row, I blogged about this genre (Is a Loveless, Joyless, Purposeless Life Still Worth Living?). And I might easily add this book to the list of books I mention. Or maybe not.
The protagonist is a bit nuts, so that takes this story to another level and makes it more interesting than draining. I didn't find it hilarious (as claimed by some of the blurbs), except for one bit right at the end. And I was never debilitated by the bleakness, so I'm glad I read it.
I couldn't put it better. I love Beckett, did find a familiar, and the voice is the reason to read this rather bleak novel.
After recently reading two bleak novels in a row, I blogged about this genre (Is a Loveless, Joyless, Purposeless Life Still Worth Living?). And I might easily add this book to the list of books I mention. Or maybe not.
The protagonist is a bit nuts, so that takes this story to another level and makes it more interesting than draining. I didn't find it hilarious (as claimed by some of the blurbs), except for one bit right at the end. And I was never debilitated by the bleakness, so I'm glad I read it.
January 15, 2018
At 32 Helen Moran is Korean born, American adoptee barely living in New York. She's inexplicably a counsellor for troubled youth where she may or may not be under investigation.
She gets a call that her non-biological, but also Korean, adopted brother has committed suicide. It's not her adoptive parents that make the call, and even when she arrives at her childhood home in Milwaukee her parents seem almost surprised by her arrival and are on edge the entire time. She hasn't talked to them in 5 years and it seems everyone would have been completely fine if that had gone on for another 5.
Meanwhile Helen is sleuthing around her old home town to try and decipher why her brother killed himself with all the nuance of a 12 year old storybook sleuth. It's a weird and disjointed read. People float in and out of Helen's narrative. Later in the book we find Helen's brother wondering whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic. We're seeing the world through her eyes and it's off kilter and meandering filled with jarring affectations and sneaky contradictions. The writing proved elusive to me and I just never made a connection.
She gets a call that her non-biological, but also Korean, adopted brother has committed suicide. It's not her adoptive parents that make the call, and even when she arrives at her childhood home in Milwaukee her parents seem almost surprised by her arrival and are on edge the entire time. She hasn't talked to them in 5 years and it seems everyone would have been completely fine if that had gone on for another 5.
Meanwhile Helen is sleuthing around her old home town to try and decipher why her brother killed himself with all the nuance of a 12 year old storybook sleuth. It's a weird and disjointed read. People float in and out of Helen's narrative. Later in the book we find Helen's brother wondering whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic. We're seeing the world through her eyes and it's off kilter and meandering filled with jarring affectations and sneaky contradictions. The writing proved elusive to me and I just never made a connection.
May 19, 2018
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4
Excellent, descriptive, and varied GR reviews of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace have been written by my GR friends Doug, Gumble’s Yard, Jonathan Pool, Neil, and Paul Fulcher. I urge you to read their fuller reviews, and I’m purposely keeping my comments brief.
Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is, simply, a stunning novel. It’s back cover blurbs could include Once read, never forgotten and Guaranteed to disrupt your peace. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is hardly pleasant reading, but it’s perversely absorbing, just as Helen Moran (AKA Sister Reliability, AKA spinster from a book) is both perverse and fascinating. Helen's self-awareness seems off-kilter, and she displays a veritable DSM-5 of personality problems. A friend of her brother’s confronts her: ”Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? he said. You constantly have a crazy look on your face. I bet you didn’t know that. Well it’s true. I have to go, good luck.” To the reader, Helen is alternatively maddening, depressing, appalling, and yet somehow touching and sympathetic. But it’s not just Helen. Her ”adoptive” mother, father, and brother bring with them their share of disorders too. Helen’s mother tryies to sympathize with Helen after her brother’s funeral: ”It’s a difficult time for everyone, she said, but it will all be fine eventually.” The entire Moran family could serve as a useful antidote to any reader’s self-pity about one’s own family dysfunctions. Cottrell’s banging us over the head with adoptive at every mention of her family and its members constantly reminds us of just how dysfunctional they all are.
In Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Cottrell dares us to try to understand and perhaps even sympathize with Helen. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace falls into the recently burgeoning number of novels with shocking protagonists, such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Anakana Schofield’s Martin John, and Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love. Like Mosfegh, Schofield, and Harwicz, Cottrell introduces nasty bits of everyday life, such as bedbug infestations and ”pieces of dried-up mucous stuck to the wall along the baseboards, crusty pieces of snot attached to the wall.” But where Eileen, Martin John, and Die, My Love feel unrelievedly bleak, Cottrell provides some shreds of hope for Helen. Here’s Helen: “If someone asked me to describe myself, I would say I was the adoptive sister who missed her adoptive brother’s funeral.” Despite the horrors of her adoptive parents’ behavior, despite her inability to accomplish the smallest task correctly, despite her remarkable ability to offend, Helen can still feel embarrassment, shame, and even pride.
Others have seen humor, albeit black humor, in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. I see mostly sadness. But Cottrell does display a low key, sneaky humor. There’s Helen swapping out her veil for a ”bejeweled headband” for her first communion. There’s Helen’s extended riff about ”the most basic thing it behooves you to understand is that, as a poor troubled brown person, rich white people’s problems are much larger and more important than yours.” And then there’s my favorite, Helen examining her brother’s mobile phone: ”It only now occurred to me that there were clues and traces in the text archive. My adoptive brother was a cryptic person and there were certainly hidden meanings behind each little cloud of gray. UNPACK THE TEXT, I shouted to myself. I began to scroll through out text history and I could say that many of his texts were very basic and practical. KOBE BRYANT!!! said one of them.”
Excellent, descriptive, and varied GR reviews of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace have been written by my GR friends Doug, Gumble’s Yard, Jonathan Pool, Neil, and Paul Fulcher. I urge you to read their fuller reviews, and I’m purposely keeping my comments brief.
Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is, simply, a stunning novel. It’s back cover blurbs could include Once read, never forgotten and Guaranteed to disrupt your peace. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is hardly pleasant reading, but it’s perversely absorbing, just as Helen Moran (AKA Sister Reliability, AKA spinster from a book) is both perverse and fascinating. Helen's self-awareness seems off-kilter, and she displays a veritable DSM-5 of personality problems. A friend of her brother’s confronts her: ”Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? he said. You constantly have a crazy look on your face. I bet you didn’t know that. Well it’s true. I have to go, good luck.” To the reader, Helen is alternatively maddening, depressing, appalling, and yet somehow touching and sympathetic. But it’s not just Helen. Her ”adoptive” mother, father, and brother bring with them their share of disorders too. Helen’s mother tryies to sympathize with Helen after her brother’s funeral: ”It’s a difficult time for everyone, she said, but it will all be fine eventually.” The entire Moran family could serve as a useful antidote to any reader’s self-pity about one’s own family dysfunctions. Cottrell’s banging us over the head with adoptive at every mention of her family and its members constantly reminds us of just how dysfunctional they all are.
In Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Cottrell dares us to try to understand and perhaps even sympathize with Helen. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace falls into the recently burgeoning number of novels with shocking protagonists, such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Anakana Schofield’s Martin John, and Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love. Like Mosfegh, Schofield, and Harwicz, Cottrell introduces nasty bits of everyday life, such as bedbug infestations and ”pieces of dried-up mucous stuck to the wall along the baseboards, crusty pieces of snot attached to the wall.” But where Eileen, Martin John, and Die, My Love feel unrelievedly bleak, Cottrell provides some shreds of hope for Helen. Here’s Helen: “If someone asked me to describe myself, I would say I was the adoptive sister who missed her adoptive brother’s funeral.” Despite the horrors of her adoptive parents’ behavior, despite her inability to accomplish the smallest task correctly, despite her remarkable ability to offend, Helen can still feel embarrassment, shame, and even pride.
Others have seen humor, albeit black humor, in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. I see mostly sadness. But Cottrell does display a low key, sneaky humor. There’s Helen swapping out her veil for a ”bejeweled headband” for her first communion. There’s Helen’s extended riff about ”the most basic thing it behooves you to understand is that, as a poor troubled brown person, rich white people’s problems are much larger and more important than yours.” And then there’s my favorite, Helen examining her brother’s mobile phone: ”It only now occurred to me that there were clues and traces in the text archive. My adoptive brother was a cryptic person and there were certainly hidden meanings behind each little cloud of gray. UNPACK THE TEXT, I shouted to myself. I began to scroll through out text history and I could say that many of his texts were very basic and practical. KOBE BRYANT!!! said one of them.”
May 20, 2017
Imagine a McSweeney's blog post. Overdone, obsessive, anxious, ironic, repetitious. And fun for a page or two. Fortunately, the typical post is only a page or two.
Now imagine a whole novel: 300 pages of anxious, ironic pose (and yes, I left that 'r' out). I grant that McSweeney's lovers might find this amazing. But I just find it tiresome.
I read 30 pages or so. Didn't like it. Then read about 50 more pages. Liked it even less. I grant that there's a possible ending in which Helen, the narcissistic protagonist trying to figure out her adoptive brother's suicide (yeah, I said it: "adoptive": That word is never missing. Adoptive parent, adoptive brother, I wouldn't be surprised by adoptive roommate. Issues, maybe? That's the all-too-obvious point) comes to some beautiful understanding and resolution.
Nah. Hypothetical expectations about the ending of a novel that starts out so badly are almost never met.
If Helen comes to such a realization, she probably doesn't realize it--part of the McSweeney's genre it to be ironic about irony.
I've said elsewhere that I have a hard time dropping novels, even if I don't like them. But I recently read an article, I think by Hari Kunzru , about the freedom of putting a book down. There are too many good books. Life's too short to read the bad ones.
Thanks, Hari. I owe you.
Now imagine a whole novel: 300 pages of anxious, ironic pose (and yes, I left that 'r' out). I grant that McSweeney's lovers might find this amazing. But I just find it tiresome.
I read 30 pages or so. Didn't like it. Then read about 50 more pages. Liked it even less. I grant that there's a possible ending in which Helen, the narcissistic protagonist trying to figure out her adoptive brother's suicide (yeah, I said it: "adoptive": That word is never missing. Adoptive parent, adoptive brother, I wouldn't be surprised by adoptive roommate. Issues, maybe? That's the all-too-obvious point) comes to some beautiful understanding and resolution.
Nah. Hypothetical expectations about the ending of a novel that starts out so badly are almost never met.
If Helen comes to such a realization, she probably doesn't realize it--part of the McSweeney's genre it to be ironic about irony.
I've said elsewhere that I have a hard time dropping novels, even if I don't like them. But I recently read an article, I think by Hari Kunzru , about the freedom of putting a book down. There are too many good books. Life's too short to read the bad ones.
Thanks, Hari. I owe you.
June 2, 2017
This book with its infestations of insects and grief.
This book with its distanced narrator and her unbearable forward progressions.
This book that seeps into you. coming on like a dry rotting.
This book that knocks you down in the end.
This book with its distanced narrator and her unbearable forward progressions.
This book that seeps into you. coming on like a dry rotting.
This book that knocks you down in the end.
February 8, 2021
this sad strange little book is about helen, a woman who must return to her childhood home for her adoptive brother's funeral. her brother has killed himself, and she is determined to find out how and why he disappeared into "the abyss" of death.
i was continually reminded of Threats, another novel about an uncomfortably odd character behaving inappropriately in the midst of grief. there is an isolating sense of distance between helen and her adoptive parents; helen and the grief counselor; helen and everyone else she encounters. she is alone in trying to unravel the mysteries of her brother's suicide. it never seems to occur to her to ask her parents for information; instead it is her duty to make sense of things; she must live up to her title of "sister reliability."
helen's peculiar choices seem to come from somewhere in the blurry spaces between grief mindset & idiosyncrasy & mental illness. how do you cope with the unknowns of death and loss when there's a barrier of unrelatability and non-understanding between you and everyone else who is grieving?
the book is often morbid and even gross, but there are some passages of vivid warmth. my favorite: while the house is full of people staying overnight for the funeral, helen reminisces about her childhood home being full of guests one christmas.
much of the story puzzled me, and i was never sure how i felt about our quirky protagonist. in the end, the person i empathize with most is her troubled brother, though we get only a small peek into his mind.
i was continually reminded of Threats, another novel about an uncomfortably odd character behaving inappropriately in the midst of grief. there is an isolating sense of distance between helen and her adoptive parents; helen and the grief counselor; helen and everyone else she encounters. she is alone in trying to unravel the mysteries of her brother's suicide. it never seems to occur to her to ask her parents for information; instead it is her duty to make sense of things; she must live up to her title of "sister reliability."
helen's peculiar choices seem to come from somewhere in the blurry spaces between grief mindset & idiosyncrasy & mental illness. how do you cope with the unknowns of death and loss when there's a barrier of unrelatability and non-understanding between you and everyone else who is grieving?
the book is often morbid and even gross, but there are some passages of vivid warmth. my favorite: while the house is full of people staying overnight for the funeral, helen reminisces about her childhood home being full of guests one christmas.
My room seemed to be situated so one could hear everything going on below in the house, and even though the house was so expansive and empty, from the cozy perch of my childhood bedroom, all alone, the house itself felt very small and cheerful. Listening to the voices from below brought me back to that time and how beautiful it was to be alone in first grade. To sit on my bed alone with a book like 'The Secret of the Wooden Lady,' and to hear human voices, and to know and truly feel that there were people below, and at the same time to not feel compelled to join them. It was a luxurious feeling to cherish, because the exact texture of that feeling happened so few times in my life.
much of the story puzzled me, and i was never sure how i felt about our quirky protagonist. in the end, the person i empathize with most is her troubled brother, though we get only a small peek into his mind.
October 9, 2017
Sorry To Disrupt The Peace, by Patty Yumi Cottrell, tells the story of a suicide and its effect on the family, particularly the sibling. It is told from the point of view of Helen, born in Korea and adopted when a baby by Paul and Mary Moran of Milwaukee, USA. Helen was raised in her adoptive parents’ large if frugal home alongside her younger brother, also born in Korea and adopted when a baby. Their upbringing was not a happy one for multiple reasons, poignantly portrayed.
Helen now lives in New York City, in a shared studio apartment, where she is phoned by an uncle to be told of her adoptive brother’s demise. She describes herself thus:
“At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror I saw something upright and plain.”
Helen decides that she will fly to Milwaukee, despite not having contacted her parents in several years, to provide comfort and discover why her brother took his life. Arriving at their childhood home without warning she resents that the welcome given is less than effusive. She is irritated by the presence of a grief councillor as this was the role she had assigned herself.
In the days leading up to her brother’s funeral, Helen questions those who had spent time with him in the years since she left. He had remained in Milwaukee and still lived with their parents. Helen’s interrogations prove upsetting. Even her attempts at being helpful are not well received.
It is clear from early in the story that something about Helen is out of kilter. She prides herself on her ethical practices and reliability, that she has transformed herself into someone she regards as virtuous. She aims to offer succour yet seems incapable of empathy.
The narrative voice has a disturbing undercurrent. Helen’s scattered thoughts, inappropriate sharing, her ragged memories and attempts at fitting in, can erupt into antisocial behaviour. She believes her needs are often ignored in favour of others. She has cultivated a strategy for survival that proves brittle under stress.
There are moments of humour, particularly around Helen’s work as an after-school supervisor of troubled young people. That she can support herself in this way perplexes those who knew her from Milwaukee. She feels satisfaction that she managed to get, and stay, away.
The restless prose travels inexorably towards a climax that is deeply disturbing yet brilliantly rendered. Helen’s isolation pulses with dark energy.
A powerful evocation of a family damaged despite well meaning intentions. A tragedy of the living as well as the dead.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, And Other Stories.
Helen now lives in New York City, in a shared studio apartment, where she is phoned by an uncle to be told of her adoptive brother’s demise. She describes herself thus:
“At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror I saw something upright and plain.”
Helen decides that she will fly to Milwaukee, despite not having contacted her parents in several years, to provide comfort and discover why her brother took his life. Arriving at their childhood home without warning she resents that the welcome given is less than effusive. She is irritated by the presence of a grief councillor as this was the role she had assigned herself.
In the days leading up to her brother’s funeral, Helen questions those who had spent time with him in the years since she left. He had remained in Milwaukee and still lived with their parents. Helen’s interrogations prove upsetting. Even her attempts at being helpful are not well received.
It is clear from early in the story that something about Helen is out of kilter. She prides herself on her ethical practices and reliability, that she has transformed herself into someone she regards as virtuous. She aims to offer succour yet seems incapable of empathy.
The narrative voice has a disturbing undercurrent. Helen’s scattered thoughts, inappropriate sharing, her ragged memories and attempts at fitting in, can erupt into antisocial behaviour. She believes her needs are often ignored in favour of others. She has cultivated a strategy for survival that proves brittle under stress.
There are moments of humour, particularly around Helen’s work as an after-school supervisor of troubled young people. That she can support herself in this way perplexes those who knew her from Milwaukee. She feels satisfaction that she managed to get, and stay, away.
The restless prose travels inexorably towards a climax that is deeply disturbing yet brilliantly rendered. Helen’s isolation pulses with dark energy.
A powerful evocation of a family damaged despite well meaning intentions. A tragedy of the living as well as the dead.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, And Other Stories.
March 14, 2017
I love the narrators honesty and bluntness -- it feels like you're really in the characters head. The book is written as actual thoughts a real human could have, rather than thoughts an author would want a character in their book to have. The main character seems like the kind of character you might want to see in a more realistic, authentic portrayal of "Girls" -- incredibly self-centered, naive but funny and genuine. There are many thoughts I have had myself and many thoughts that put words to experiences or emotions I've felt myself. I like how some of the most tragic moments are wrought with humor. The character is so frustrating and difficult to sympathize with because of how she seems like she's making an inroad but really she's just being presumptuous or not thinking things through clearly. She wants to connect too many dots and also connect everything back to herself eventually. The start of one chapter is "two steps forward one step back. One step forward, two steps back" and I was amazed because I had been thinking about that in regards to the main character for the entirety of the book up to that point !! Like the author reading my mind. And the last few chapters (beginning with the second set of silver pages which aesthetically is the coolest thing ever!!!) are just heart wrenching like I haven't read something this intense and moving and emotional in a super long time and it was beautiful. The last time I read a book this good was The Mothers. Everyone should read this book. Wowowow I am emotionally wrecked. They say don't judge a book by it's cover, but this cover is just as stunning as the writing within it.
November 5, 2017
Helen Moran is 32, underemployed and sharing a tiny studio apartment in NYC. She is the adopted daughter of Catholic couple in Milwaukee. She and her younger brother are both adopted from Korea. Helen is a woman who is friendless and rootless. She experienced some success as an experimental artist in Milwaukee but that ended and she moved to NY leaving her brother behind. As depressed as Helen is, she is not immobilized by her state, but her brother is. One day she receives a call from an unknown uncle telling her that her brother has committed suicide.
Throughout the book Helen refers to her parents as her adoptive parents. This seems primarily to be due to the fact that they are not loving parents. Their lives revolve around the Catholic church and being miserly. They harp on and on about saving money but they carry it to an extreme. Their extremes are similar to the excesses of hoarders who ruin their homes by collecting items of little worth that then become homes to invading insects and wildlife. The Moran's home became almost inhabitable at one point when contractors had to come in and tear out walls to discover the source of an unbearable smell. Helen arrives home to discover her parents have replaced the living room furniture with outdoor wicker furniture that they probably bought at a yard sale.
Helen is determined to find out how her brother died, and why he took his own life. It is a sad story. Helen's search gives her some meaning and at the end of the book there is some hope that she may find her way.
Throughout the book Helen refers to her parents as her adoptive parents. This seems primarily to be due to the fact that they are not loving parents. Their lives revolve around the Catholic church and being miserly. They harp on and on about saving money but they carry it to an extreme. Their extremes are similar to the excesses of hoarders who ruin their homes by collecting items of little worth that then become homes to invading insects and wildlife. The Moran's home became almost inhabitable at one point when contractors had to come in and tear out walls to discover the source of an unbearable smell. Helen arrives home to discover her parents have replaced the living room furniture with outdoor wicker furniture that they probably bought at a yard sale.
Helen is determined to find out how her brother died, and why he took his own life. It is a sad story. Helen's search gives her some meaning and at the end of the book there is some hope that she may find her way.
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