BOOKED Solid

If you have a "must read" list, then you really should put Alison Smith’s book on it. Name All the Animals is a beautifully written memoir that chronicles death, grief, love of family, coming-of-age, and sexual awakening. All big themes, but handled with skill and an insight that is both touching, and, at times, shattering.

In this, her first book, Smith (an alumna of Yaddo and MacDowell writers’ colonies) writes of the summer morning her 18-year-old brother, Roy, drove off to work in a pouring rain. She awoke to the news that he was dead—killed in an automobile accident. Smith was 15, and as the policemen arrive at the door she writes, "You could almost smell the pity. Mother held a hand to her throat and trembled. She begged them not to say it. Mrs. Smith, there’s been an accident."

The loss is devastating to the Smiths, a solid, Roman Catholic family that is slightly dysfunctional as are most families, but unwaveringly loyal in their love for one another. The mother, father, and Alison each struggle to find ways to cope with the unimaginable loss. There are the endless nights where no one seems to sleep, just wander ghost-like through the still house. Lavon Smith, the mother, engages in a charade that Alison and Roy used to call "playing Kremlin"—rearranging facts until they suit her. It is heart wrenching to read of her loading up volumes of encyclopedias, ordered for Roy to take with him to college, as they arrive two at a time, into a backpack and hiking with them for miles. Royden, the father, clings to Alison, "Baby, you’re all I have left" and while keeping his staunch belief in God, desperately asks, "What happened to Roy’s [guardian] angel? Where was he that morning? Did he fall asleep on the job?"

Alison has her own rituals that should help her accept that her brother is dead, yet cross over into the realm of magical thinking that he will miraculously return. When they were young they were so close that their mother called them by the combined name of Alroy. They played together and as siblings will, tolerated their parents’ idiosyncrasies. Their father started each morning with the ritual of blessing both children with relics that had been give to him as a wedding present. Drifting in and out of sleep Alison would hear her father’s gentle voice intoning, "Bless his mind. Bless his throat. Bless his hands. Bless his voice." "Why does he do that?" I asked once. "Why does he have to touch the relic to us and bless all the parts of us?" "He’s naming them," Roy said through the covers. "Why?" "Because he’s taking care of us. It’s like Adam in the Garden of Eden. He’s got to name us, like Adam named all the animals. To keep track of us."

Alison’s journey toward dimming her grief leads her nightly to a fort she and Roy built. She secretes most of her evening meal in a paper bag and takes it to the fort, leaving it for him to eat. The fact that it’s gone each morning keeps her hopes alive and this daily sacrifice puts her on the road to disdain food and embrace anorexia. The one false note in this book is the fact that neither her parents nor the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy seem to notice that Alison is physically disappearing and has all the external symptoms of the anorectic.

Going through adolescence is difficult in the best of times but Alison’s struggle with her pain, along with her search for her own identity is compounded by being known as "the girl whose brother died." That label allows the nuns to overlook much of her behavior when it strays out of bounds. And what could be more out of bounds in a Catholic girls’ school than when Alison is found in bed with another girl. She has succumbed to first love with classmate Terry and that love carries her forward to the possibility of a world that is not centered in grief. When they are discovered curled around each other asleep in, of all places, the dean of discipline, Sister Barbara’s bed only Terry faces discipline, and Alison is left with guilt.