Barrelhouse Reviews: Fifty Miles, by Sheryl St. Germain
Review by Amy Blakemore
Etruscan Press / February, 2020 / 200 pp
When I think about loss, I think about “Meditation at Lagunitas,” where Robert Hass wrote: “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” Perhaps this is why I found Fifty Miles intriguing even before opening it. Sheryl St. Germain, who writes about the loss of her son from addiction, and the addiction that runs in her family, quantifies her grief: it’s fifty miles long.
In many ways, Fifty Miles is a memoir about voyages, about where our minds (and bodies) wander throughout loss—before, during, and after it. In a series of linked essays, and small explosions of full-out poetry, St. Germain takes us to her son’s grade school in Texas, to a glacier in Alaska, into the fantasy realms of video games, into her own broken but healing heart in Baton Rouge. We travel with her in search of understanding the 50 miles that her son, Gray, drove to Decatur, Texas, where he would die by overdose after an optimistic period of sobriety. This titular essay, which links St. Germain’s own journey 50 miles to leave behind drug use and a toxic relationship, aches with a survivor’s question: why did she walk away that day—and why didn’t he?
Using form, St. Germain testifies that any answers to this question—and perhaps even the question itself—cannot be articulated through traditional narrative. In the memoir’s most painful moments, St. Germain breaks into lyricism and poetry, such as in “Undoing a Death,” where she attempts to rewind Gray’s overdose and keep him safe in bed. In these poetic moments, she asks what it would mean “[t]o use the word addict in the old way that also means devotion, consecration.” She makes puttanesca for the first time since Gray’s death. One line of thought advises that this blurred genre approach “resists narrative,” but St. Germain reminds us that poetry is the narrative—it is the way the story must be told to be comprehensible.
As St. Germain writes in her prologue, “The ‘merely rational’ will never fully address problems of desire for Spirit that one sees in the alcoholic or addict.” But one of Fifty Miles’s strengths is that it is as analytical as it is lyrical. I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did in Fifty Miles, but I learned about crocheting and corporal punishment in Texas and World of Warcraft, topics I never would have associated with grief and addiction. Perhaps this is why it is a rare work that doesn’t retraumatize as it reads. We wander in and out of death; we ache, rather than being pricked. And because St. Germain meditates on her own recovery from substance abuse, she creates a meditation on another’s suffering that doesn’t other that suffering or make it spectacle. Here, pain is shared, inherited.
St. Germain doesn’t identify any clear answers for her son’s death or her own recovery—how could she?—but by the end of the memoir, one prescription is clear: art, whether writing or choosing a good yarn or playing a druid online, is lifesaving. These discussions of art are broad—so big they might have justified their own collection, their own space to be explored—but they add a constructive element to the memoir, a kind of manual for survivors. St. Germain also writes about nature and travel in a similar fashion, to demonstrate how physical movement and relocation can expedite healing. But her best demonstration of this healing is in her memories of Gray—a more intimate and arduous kind of travel.
There’s a line from Fifty Miles that I can’t stop thinking about, a reflection on Gray: “witnesses said his face had turned blue—but what shade of blue.” When I think about grief, I’ll now think about this unpunctuated question: about this yearning for specificity—these fine details of death we turn away from and then, yes, return to. After however many miles.
Amy Blakemore writes about the body. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, PANK, Wigleaf, The Indiana Review, and elsewhere, and she has received support from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, WritingxWriters, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She is at work on her first novel, a horror story about girlhood, and a collection of essays on eating disorders, queerness, and television.