by Astrid Blodgett
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2023/$24.99/224 pp.
The title of Astrid Blodgett’s latest collection, This is How You Start to Disappear, is a phrase from one of the stories, and disappearance, literally and metaphorically, is a recurring theme throughout the book. These 12 stories show teenage girls being “disappeared”—rendered invisible—by teenage boys, wives being disappeared by husbands, children being disappeared by adults, and women and girls disappearing themselves as a cultural expectation and survival mechanism. The opening story, “These People Have Nothing,” for instance, as with several in the collection, portrays a narrator revisiting a traumatic event that has shaped her life. In this case, a woman reflects on a childhood incident involving the family dog and her parents’ failing marriage. When the narrator thinks of her own failed marriage, she tells us: “I knew, now, what it was like to be looked at and not seen.”
Children in these stories are smart and self-aware. In “Devil’s Lake,” the “nine-almost-ten”-year-old narrator realizes that her father is not taking her skating to spend time with her. He has other motivations. She wishes she was with her mother. “I pretend it’s just me and mom and that I’m invisible. I know how, because sometimes mom imagines she’s invisible.”
Although the children are often more mature than the adults, they can also be perpetrators of violence—and lifelong silent witnesses. In “The Fainting Game,” a group of girls at summer camp participate in a clandestine activity with dire consequences. In “Alex and Clayton and Raylene and Me,” a young boy watches the older boys’ mistreatment of a girl, and we see it replaying later in his adult behaviour with women. In “The Night the Moon was Bright and We Ate Pigs and Brownies and Drank Fizzy Beer and Didn’t Remember Much at All, in the End,” the narrator struggles to make an entire evening, and her role in it, disappear from her memory.
Blodgett’s writing is especially tangible in her descriptions of outdoor environments and activities. In two stories that deal with canoeing, “The Golden Rice Bowl,” about a misunderstanding and falling out between two friends who paddled together in their youth, and “How to Read Water,” about a family of four on an ill-fated canoe trip, Blodgett gently launches us on the water and steers us into a writing sweet-spot of realism without overwhelming river-tripping technicalities.
This is a collection of skillfully woven, layered narratives that, even after several readings, continue to deliver discoveries and insights into the precarious but persistent human condition. As a grandfather in one story advises, “Some days you just put one foot in front of the other…. That’s how you make a life.”
—Barb Howard is a fiction and non-fiction author in Calgary.
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