Dear Kevin Wilson,
I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to. I don't want to put your other books on hold at the library, or follow you on social media, or see your name pop up in the table of contents in the next New Yorker I miraculously manage to crack open because more details would make you into a more real person, which would dim the magic of the world you made in Nothing to See Here. I want the inner fabric of the story to stay real, so I think it's best if you remain in its shadowy periphery. But I also want to say thank you to someone because it was so good - so very good - and I feel a lot of hope for myself and for my kids in the wake of finishing it under a little spotlight on this airplane gliding through the dark night sky somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe Florida. I can't see a thing down there so it's hard to say. But it feels good to point one's gratitude in a particular direction. (Which is, incidentally, a big part of why I believe in God.)
I started your book a couple of days into a trip to Jamaica with my three children, after I had finished Nora McInerny's second memoir, No Happy Endings. Somehow that seems pertinent because the two stories have been talking to each other in my mind. My husband died twenty-one months ago after nearly three years of experimental treatments for his rare lymphoma. Five days before we departed for Jamaica, the first man I've dated since Mike died broke up with me after three very disorienting and exciting weeks. My children were not at all pleased with this brief romance; not that I wanted them to know about it, but predictably the cat yowled and scratched its way out of that bag almost immediately. So it was a thing. And its ending was strange and sad for me but eventually - like two days later - I came to see that it was right and felt peaceful about it. He wasn't well enough, and I've done enough caregiving for the time being. But now I know that kind of thing can happen.
Needless to say, there were many moments while swimming and sunning and ordering three Shirley Temples and one mojito at the swim up bar at the Beaches resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, surrounded by healthy happy not even sunburned mom-dad-and-two kids families when I felt like a total weirdo. I felt marked by all we have been through, like there must be a big flashing sign over my head blinking the word GRIEVING or LONELY or BUSTED or maybe just NOT NORMAL* with a big arrow pointing at my heart. I couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only single parent in the whole strange alternate world of the resort. I was definitely the only person who cried the whole boat trip back from snorkeling, thinking of the calm Papa presence my terrified Beatrice didn't have with her in the water, and the wonderful guide who offered her his own impersonal version of that, which totally worked.
But I also had so many moments of gratitude, and awareness of the closeness and understanding I have with my kids. They are weirdos with me. They know. They didn't glom onto the packs of privileged children that roamed the resort, ice cream cones in hand, dripping chlorine in line at the water slide, yelling to one another. That would have been fine, and they could have done that, because they have decent social skills, plus they're pretty privileged too and took to the endless supplies of sweets and thrills just as effortlessly as any well-tended American child would. But I think we preferred each others' company. Only we knew what their Papa would say about the late night karaoke that kept us awake at night, or the curly fries we ate every day, or the way Beatrice, eyes shining, loved snorkeling in the end. Only we knew that we were there because he died - no way would Mike have set foot in that place. Also we're smart and funny and good company. And excellent huggers. And we are, actually, ready to embrace everything, to eat it all, drink it in, tolerate fear and cheesiness in equal measure despite our (to varying degrees) cautious temperaments, because of all we have lost.
So anyway. Your quiet/not quiet excellent book gave me hope for weirdo children, and weirdo adults too. For the possibility that lonely weirdo adults can take good care of lonely weirdo children, and not let them down ever - at least not in any big terrible ways. Right now my heart is so broken and so big, so vast, in this strange and unplanned and porous moment in my life. Your novel offered an unexpected version of that state of being. I recognized myself in it. Who wouldn't, really? I love that.
Thank you.
yours truly,
Meagan
*I do realize that these are feelings most all humans experience, even gorgeous moms with living husbands sipping frozen drinks on the beach in Jamaica. Nothing to see here, I know. It was just hard to remember that sometimes during our trip.
