Something inhabits the summers of childhood that makes our skin itch. It’s not the heat as much as the heavy air of waiting–for school to start, for bicycles left in lawns to be once again stored properly, for long days to become long nights. Summers such as these have launched many coming-of-age novels, as the mistakes of summer haunt the school room halls and dining room tables of autumn and winter. (To Kill a Mockingbird, My Name is Asher Lev, The Virigin Suicides, The Round House, etc.)
Which leads me to my first question:
What were you doing in the summer of 1989? *
If you listened to This American Life’s new podcast, Serial, then you know how important (and damning) questions like this can be. (If you haven’t listened to Serial yet, that’s okay, you can download it and listen to it for free in between chapters of M. O. Walsh’s debut novel, My Sunshine Away)
Set in Baton Rouge, My Sunshine Away follows the 14 year-old narrator’s love-turned-obsession with Lindy Simpson, the girl next door. The seeming innocence of the year is shattered when Lindy is raped on her way home from track practice. The narrator knows something, but as the novel unravels, along with the mystery and the innocence of childhood/first love, everyone is guilty of something.
Which leads me to my second question:
How much of memory is created in hindsight?
Walsh tugs at the rug under our feet as we read. Unreliable narrators aren’t anything new. We all read Catcher in the Rye. We know what’s coming. But Walsh has nailed his characters: their blindness to the obvious, their self-delusion, their dangerous faults.
My Sunshine Away is a novel as much about Louisiana as a boy’s childhood. It is also a book about growing up in the late 1980s, of the shift from the white-picket fence childhood to the suburban nightmare. (Remember Jeffrey Dahmer?)
If you want to know what Southern writers are writing about, read My Sunshine Away. Walsh has taken an upstanding literary tradition and done good by it.
M.O. Walsh will be at Lemuria signing and reading from My Sunshine Away Thursday, February 19th at 5 PM.
*If you weren’t around in 1989 to remember it, just listen to Taylor Swift’s new album and you’ll know nothing about 1989, but you’ll have a lot of catchy songs stuck in your head.
Written by Adie
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