Shattered Family Finds the Courage to Go On
TORCH, by Charyl Strayed. Houghton Mifflin. 322 pages. $24.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 16, 2006
Teresa Rae Wood is the kind of woman about whom her fellow rural Minnesotans say, "it takes all kinds." She hosts a show called Modern Pioneers on her local public radio station, signing off with the same words every week: "Work hard. Do good. Be incredible."
Even as they fit right into their hardscrabble, working-class home in Coltrap County, Teresa and her kids are different. They're vegetarians. They don't own a television. Teresa doesn't believe in marriage, but she does believe in love, and she knew what it was when she fell for Bruce.
He was a perfect fit, and the four of them - Teresa, Bruce, and Teresa's kids, Claire and Joshua -- make a happy, if unconventional, family. Until Teresa gets sick. "Can. Sir. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all." Teresa is 38 years old when, seven weeks after she is diagnosed, she dies.
Torch, by first-time novelist Cheryl Strayed, tells the story of Teresa's family as they suffer with the hand they've been dealt. It's a beautiful book, expansive in its treatment of tragedy and grief, but equally attentive to all of the most telling details. The language is lovely, offering delicious, compelling imagery without being heavy-handed.
Each member of the family responds to Teresa's death differently. Like tiny planets of grief, they revolve around each other but never touch. Even in one another's presence, each feels as if he is drifting alone, unmoored in the vastness of loss.
Strayed's depiction of these dynamics is heartbreakingly real; as a reader you almost want to shield your eyes from what you know is coming, or to holler at the characters, or hug them.
Joshua, a teenager just months from graduation, begins to self-destruct, selling drugs and dropping out of high school. Claire embarks on an unlikely affair with an older man, breaks up her own relationship, and drops out of college while trying desperately to hold herself and her family together. And once Bruce realizes he lacks the courage to kill himself, he remarries so quickly that he estranges himself from Claire and Joshua -- and by so doing, deprives them not only of a mother, but of a father, too.
Through it all, Teresa's presence is everywhere: literally, as when the radio station plays re-runs of Modern Pioneers, and figuratively, as the memory of her spunk and her courage propels her loved ones onwards and upwards, out of their grief and back into the world and all its exquisite adventures.
