Torch

Genre: Fiction

I gave this book ****

This is the story of a family: Theresa, Claire, Joshua and Bruce and what happens to them when Theresa, partner and mother, is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and dies within a few weeks of her diagnosis. When Theresa dies Claire is a student in college, living away from home, Joshua is a senior in high school and Bruce (who is not Claire and Joshua’s birth father, but has been a father to them since they were very young) is employed as a carpenter. The story goes back to the past to describe some of the kids’ childhoods and some of the events when Theresa and Bruce first meet. But the focus is really what happens to this family from diagnosis, Theresa’s death and through the first year of grief, heartache and learning to navigate life without the person who holds them all together.

Strayed is a masterful writer, but even more so, masterful at understanding and recording the human emotions of loss, the deepest of sadness and the struggles of recovery. That said, I wish I read this book before I read Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things because this story feels very familiar. I tried so hard to un-know what I already know about Strayed from her previous books and just focus on this story, but it was hard. This is so very clearly based on her own experiences of losing her mother and it feels like an autobiography (mixed in with some fictional details), one that I’ve already read and love. I’m a little conflicted about this because, isn’t a good writer someone who can take what they know and incorporate it into a story? It seems that for Strayed, writing is the path to healing and that is a beautiful thing, in particular, for someone so talented, but I wonder if whether all three of her published works have the same theme of loss going through them, can she effectively write about something other than loss or is loss so very much ingrained in her that there isn’t another story there? Whatever the answer, I am a true fan of Strayed’s exceptional writing and will continue to put her books on my reading list.