Grief and guilt

Your silence, it has always been the most perfect punishment.

Alison Espach, Notes on Your  Sudden Disappearance

Grief and guilt come together like a matched set. Where there's one, there's usually the other. So it is in Alison Espach's impressive first novel Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (2022).

Although written in the style of a comic novel, the story rarely turns comic. The novel covers 15 years in the life of Sally Holt, who addresses her narrative to her older sister Kathy.

At first, 13-year-old Sally observes Kathy's infatuation with Billy, the handsome high school basketball star. Eventually Kathy wins Billy away from another girl, and Sally is almost as thrilled as her sister is. Then one day Sally demands Billy take her to her school, even though it risks making Billy and Kathy late for high school. Billy speeds, avoids a deer and hits a tree. Kathy dies in the crash, and Billy is badly injured, his promising basketball career ruined.

Thus grief and guilt overpower both Sally and Billy, not to mention the girls' parents. Having so much in common, the two teens are drawn to each other, despite their age difference. They hold long phone conversations in the middle of the night.

Years pass. Billy decides to become a friar. Sally moves to New York City, begins writing how-to essays for web sites and becomes engaged to a lawyer. Espach tells how she and Billy are brought back together by a hurricane — named Kathy.

Partly autobiographical, the novel holds power in part because of the author's deceptive light touch but mostly because it tells truth.