ADVERTISER BOOK CLUB
'Tender Land' based on a brother's death

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Sean never listened to it. Soon after he received the recording, he killed himself with an overdose of medication. He was 15.

And that is how the Irish Catholic Finneran family of St. Louis — Kathleen, her parents and her three remaining siblings — came to enter "The Tender Land," a place where, for a long time, everything hurt, even the happy memories.

Finneran, now 45, listened to the Copeland piece over and over during the decade that it took her to write the fictionalized account of her brother's death and its effect on her family. "It came to me that we are all kind of living in a 'tender land' — emotionally, psychologically, physically," said Finneran by phone from her home in St. Louis.

"The Tender Land" is this month's Advertiser Book Club selection. It's a work constructed with techniques borrowed from fiction, but one in which all the events took place. The tone is restrained, as though Finneran is dealing with memories so fragile that she fears they will burst like a soap bubble with a careless or blunt touch.

The story is told in fits and starts that move back and forth from the day that will change the family forever. At times the reader feels like a passenger in a car being driven too deliberately. We strain toward an answer to the question that plagues survivors: Why? Why would he do it? Why didn't he turn to me?

There is, of course, no answer. The person cannot be reached, and the tangible evidence is inevitably inadequate to explain that one, final moment when the deed was set fatally in motion.

Some readers may find this dissatisfying, but they're missing the point: Skillfully crafted as it is, this is not fiction. It's real life. And in real life, there is no answer. And that, even more than the absence of the loved one, is what you have to find a way to live with.

Despite its painful subject, this is not a depressing book, but a beautiful and elegiac one. Nor does it draw some contrived conclusion meant to be uplifting. It's message is that love survives.

Finneran, who says she still talks to Sean from time to time, has survived. She is writing a second piece of reminiscence, about being an aunt, and she is also working on a novel. Grants enable her to work full time on writing.

She acknowledges that, in a roundabout way, this is a gift that Sean gave her: "I feel somewhat guilty at times at making a writing career of a story that I would just as soon not have had to tell. I'm glad I was able to tell it well as long as I had to tell it, but I would have preferred never having to do it."

Kathleen Finneran

Q. Did you know you wanted to be a writer before Sean's death?

A. I started writing when I was a kid and kind of knew that I had a feeling for it. When I graduated from high school, I started out in journalism but found quickly that wasn't for me, so I started pursuing essay writing and creative writing at Washington University, where I finished my undergraduate degree. I got tremendous assistance from a group of writers there, (including) an essayist and biographer named Susan Stang, who connected with the woman who became my editor. I got the contract to write the book before it was written. It was the first serious thing I ever wrote.

Q. What was your process in writing it?

I was working a full-time job so I was writing nights and weekends until it got to the point where it was so hard to turn off my mind at night that I couldn't function at work, so I just would come home Friday nights and write all weekend. ... I would think of myself as going to writing camp. It was really kind of marvelous because I just lived in this little bubble of isolation on the weekends. I would leave my apartment and go out into the streets of New York on Sunday night and feel like I'd accomplished something. ... It was very difficult because I was a novice writer and I had to teach myself how to write while I was doing it.

Q. Is it true that your writing fell flat until you borrowed some ideas from fiction?

A. When people are writing a memoir, they kind of dismiss the idea that there are actually going to be characters in their story. We don't think of people who are living in our lives as characters, because they're real to us and we know them. But in order to let people experience them as real, I found it helpful to pretend I was creating them, to get some distance between myself and the story. ... When you're working in fiction, the reader is kind of meeting these people not very far behind the writer, so that there's a freshness there.

Q. Fewer books focus on sibling relationships than on, for example, parent-child or lover relationships. It's widely accepted that your relationship with your parents is key in defining you as a person, but siblings play a substantial role, too.

A. That's one of the themes to me that was important in the book — how we become identified in a certain way within our families and how we determine if that is actually who we are or not. We almost have to find out who we are despite what they tell us. I think there's probably a stage in everyone's life when they want to divorce themselves from what their family thinks of them and prove they're wrong. But I also think that eventually you realize that there is some essence of you that they did perceive and interpret correctly. We come to find out that what's at the core of us comes from them. Sometimes it takes a long time to find that out.

Q. Did writing the book help you to deal with Sean's death, help to answer your questions?

A. Yes, it did help. But I think the essential questions are basically unanswerable. What we get instead of answers if we're blessed, we get these little beautiful creations that we make from our pain and that can satisfy us on some other level. But, it's not over. The book didn't fix anything on a grand scale. Sometimes I read it and it makes me feel like I have a past and a future that are meaningful and possible and that's enough. That has to be enough.

Advertiser Book Club Good Read Guide

• This month's selection: "The Tender Land" by Kathleen Finneran; Mariner Books, paper, $13
• Next book to be announced: Oct. 5.
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