In the world of readers, one thing tends to lead to another and if that weren’t enough, one reader leads to another. My sister Ruth led me to her friend Joan Creighton who became a reader of this blog. Joan recently sent me to an interesting essay that she thought I would like. I read (and liked) the essay which meant I looked to see what else the writer had written, which resulted in yet another book on the pile of “to be read” books. I was so intrigued with Sean Dietrich’s essay that I couldn’t wait, and Will the Circle Be Unbroken? pushed ahead of an already interesting stack.
The book opens with, “The day before my father shot himself, I saw a blue heron. I was standing on the muddy banks of Camp Creek. The bird was there for the same reason I was. We were fishing.” I knew immediately that I had made a good choice in moving the book up on my list.
Sean’s memoir is a survivor story beginning with an abusive father who abruptly turns from an effort to kidnap and kill Sean’s mother to turning the gun on himself. Telling the story of his own life, Sean gives glimpses of a fun-loving dad scaling a fifty-foot tree to hang a tire swing for his son, an industrious steel worker, an avid baseball fan, and an abusive husband and father. All of them described the same person, the man who would recur in Sean’s life as a hero and an enemy as he tries to figure out who he is himself.
Two women figure prominently in his eventual survival after Sean scatters his father’s ashes at twelve, drops out of school, finds work in menial jobs, and eventually comes out on the other side and sees that he is not just a nobody with a sad story. His mother is an anchor from the beginning although she leaves the reader wondering how she can pull this off. He meets his wife at a church potluck, and she will be the rock that stands by him through his journey. There is also a dog with a major role.
Sean opens his life and his heart in the story with humor and grief. I found myself laughing out loud and close to tears, sometimes on the same page! In the end, I wanted to give a standing ovation to the kid who took a life that looked hopeless and made it work. I was also glad I moved the book up on my list to read!