Bound: Absent and Accounted For

Bound

Deborah Reed Knows What Makes a Heart Grow Fonder

Life’s funny. Not funny ha-ha, of course — but funny peculiar. What’s especially funny are the things that normally make up a life. Take love, for instance, which only a Mencken would consider to be laugh-out-loud. Love is something that pretty much everybody has spent some of their lives obsessing over, often to obscene degree. We talk about it and argue about it and scream about it, until our voices are hoarse. Then we do it some more. We put it on to a page or a stage or a screen or a canvas, work it into a song or a dance or a symphony; then we invite the world in for a look-see. We seek it out as if our lives depended upon it. And even if and when we find it, we often end up longing for it all over again.

It’s that love, the love that makes us wonder and worry and woeful, which permeates Deborah Reed’s Carry Yourself Back to Me (Amazon Encore $13.95). In other words, the love that can make our lives a wreck.

But this ain’t no simple love story. It’s more like the story of our lives, rendered up close and very personal. It’s also remarkably akin to how our lives have been put to song by traditional American troubadours, primarily of the Southern variety. That’s not to say Reed’s forlorn tale is the mere literary equivalent of a country song, mind you. But it isn’t very difficult to imagine Patsy Cline or June Carter Cash voicing the sentiments that make this such a compelling debut. I’m not the only one to think so either. In fact, The Dandy Warhols’ Zia McCabe was so taken by the book she put it to song herself, and then sang it with her Brush Prairie outfit.

It’s not just the lovestruck sentiment that makes Carry Yourself so indicative of song though; there’s also its lovestruck heroine, Annie Walsh, who herself is a singer-songwriter of some renown. Holed up in what’s perhaps the last pristine pocket of West Central Florida, where seasons are barely bold enough to show themselves and an entire day can be spent hoping for something to do, Walsh has made a quiet place for herself. When boyfriend Owen walks out on her “while she was at the supermarket buying chicken, cheddar cheese and a pregnancy test,” however, that place becomes the wrong kinda quiet. And it’s all Annie can do to not start braying at the moon.

Not helping matters is Annie’s beloved brother Calder, who both knew about Owen’s cheating and was up to the same kinda no good himself. When Calder gets accused of killing his paramour’s husband, things take a proverbial turn for the worse. But like every deep, darkest dark, this one prefaces a dawn. And it’s that ultimately guiding light which eventually illuminates everything.

Reed, who sidelines as the mystery writer Audrey Braun and herself boasts a previous stint as a singer-songwriter, renders her work with the nuance of the acutely-perceptive, and each sense is given its own distinct voicing. Fueled by coffee, there’s also a percolating constant to each and every day, no matter how empty they may be, or how hard it is face them. “People do things, say things, and end up with lives they never imagined,” writes Reed. But if you hold on, it just might be the kind of life worth living after all.

 

 

Category: ARTS, BOOKS, BOUND