Tiny Little Earthquakes
The reserved daughter of a family of well-heeled, damaged alcoholics determines who she wants to be in Hays Blinckmann’s poignant bildungsroman Tiny Little Earthquakes.
One of Elliot’s earliest memories is of her mother Francie’s first suicide attempt. It was soon followed by her parents’ divorce and a move to a horse farm in North Carolina. There, Elliot took solace from her mother’s tempests in television, movies, and music, losing herself in stories tidier than her own.
Francie, “a beautiful thunderstorm,” raged, drank, and was committed for detox; there was an affair, a divorce, another marriage, and another divorce. Elliot’s older sister, Poppy, inherited Francie’s tendency toward “persistent calamities,” losing her own opportunities to drugs and alcohol. Elliot’s absent father showed up on occasion, if more to judge than to help. Dysfunction abounded, amid which Elliot struggled with her sense of self: was she shy and friendless, cold and aloof, or fun and carefree? Multiple moves and disappointments threw it all into question.
Though the novel’s progression is directed by messes and disasters, including car crashes, dorm fires, sexual assaults, and another suicide attempt, it includes moments of beauty too. Elliot, ever hopeful, permits herself joys, including at her mother’s favorite site for escape, Martha’s Vineyard, where
Wild bunnies hopped out of the rosa rugosa like it was a woodland paradise. There was a pebbly beach with silky cold water that I waded in all day, looking for sea glass and snails.
Still, she knows the ground beneath her is bound to shake again in time, making her success-studded coming-of-age an uneasy one. Indeed, in college, she flirts with substances herself, trying “LSD, Ecstasy, and mushrooms” and noting “I wanted exactly what Mom and Poppy had always wanted. I wanted to be free of myself.”
As a narrator, Elliot is sometimes too self-aware, and there are a few inconsistencies in her self-presentation. Some unevenness is inevitable, though, when you have a childhood in which “really bad shit happened.” Her portraits of her privilege-blind and tormented family members, who exhibit a variety of personality disorders, are unflinching but empathetic, and her dark sense of humor is a vivifying force across the story’s often troubled territory.
Based in truth, the stirring coming-of-age novel Tiny Little Earthquakes is about a girl coming to terms with her family’s addictions and fighting her way out of codependency.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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