Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle

And I guess that's why we hold on to our bits and pieces in the first place, because we aren't immortal, and though denial fills our days and years, especially those that have slipped away, that kernel of truth is always lodged within. We are all haunted by something-- ~from Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle

Through a dozen moves and the purges each involved, there were boxes that followed me. They remained sealed and taped in each successive basement, but I knew they were there for when I would need them.

The boxes held my diaries dating back to 1963 when I was ten, poems and unfinished novels I had written, scrapbooks and mementos.

There were other boxes, too. Boxes of photographs and slides, books owned by my grandfather or mother or father, my grandfather's papers and newspaper articles, directories and yearbooks, dad's memoirs, mom's medical history.

They were the 'bits and pieces' of my life and my parent's life and my grandfather's life.

I have always been a keeper of things. I see the trait in my family, especially keeping memories and telling stories of long ago.

In Jill McCorkle's new novel Hieroglyphics, Lil is eighty-five and worried about forgetting, but her childhood memories remain vivid and clear. "I can close my eyes and know every square inch," she says of her childhood home.

Oh, me, too! I dream of the 19th c farmhouse I grew up in. I know the view from every window by heart, the turning of the stairs, the weight of layers of blankets in the unheated bedroom.

"I am homesick and I am timesick...I miss all that no longer is," Lil says.

Lil is married to Frank, who is also haunted by the past, filled with "sadness and an awareness of the shadows." When he was ten years old his father died in a train wreck, extinguishing his mother's happiness. Frank is fixated on returning to his childhood home, hoping to find what he left behind.

Frank's childhood home is now occupied by single mom Shelley and her child Harvey. Harvey is fearful, misses his father, sees ghosts, and losses himself in an alter-ego superhero with a mustache that covers the scar from his cleft palate surgery. Shelley is a court reporter who is overinvolved with the trial, in trouble for writing her thoughts into the transcript.

Each character is struggling with the scars of their past. They have kept things secret, they seek to understand the mystery of their parents.

This is a dense book, emotionally charged, with a story that opens like a night blooming flower. There is darkness, with some flashes of humor and light. It tugged at my heart. And it chilled me with recognition and the knowledge that in the blink of an eye I will be Lil, leaving behind those boxes of diaries.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Hieroglyphics
by Jill McCorkle
Algonquin Books
Publication Date July, 28, 2020 
ISBN 9781616209728
PRICE $26.95 (USD)

from the publisher

Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both—suddenly, tragically—lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely.

Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries—perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d rather forget. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember.

Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world all around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.