Marlena by Julie Buntin

As a girl, I'd had a friend who died. We were close. I didn't talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or its completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wipes those years way; instead, I feared, they defined me. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

After reading Ohio by Stephen Markley and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, books about Midwest small towns, drugs, abuse, and growing up, I decided it was the right time to read Julie Buntin's Marlena. The novel focuses on Marlena, a teenage girl in Northern Michigan caught in a web of poverty and drugs, and the lasting impact Marlena had on the narrator, Cat.

Buntin's novel caught so many things for me. The painful nostalgia for a moment in time, the haunting loss of a loved one, how in youth our naivety blinds us to darker realities.

I want to go home--a phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping at the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular places--not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? from Marlena by Julie Buntin

The narrator, Cat, is living in New York City with a good job and a loving husband. She is an alcoholic. Cat tells the story of being the new girl in a small Up North town, looking for a new best friend. She develops a girl crush on a charismatic and beautiful older teen who lives next door. Cat, fifteen, wants to be like Marlena--cool, daring, exciting, experienced.

After her dad left them, Cat's mom moved the family from Pontiac to her childhood vacation spot, Silver Lake. Silver Lake is a half hour away from the school and Walmart and the nearest mall is ninety miles downstate. It is also down the road from the mansions along Lake Michigan where the 1% come to play, and a historic, elite Methodist enclave. Cat's mom has a drinking problem and with no job skills is lucky to get a job cleaning a summer estate.

Catherine had been on scholarship at a private school, a good student, college-bound, a bookish loner. Her older brother walked away from a college scholarship to help take care of his mom. Moving is a chance to reinvent herself as Cat, an edgier and more risk-taking girl.

Marlena's mom disappeared years back and her addict dad has a meth lab in the woods. Marlena cares for her younger brother as best she can, but he is often alone with no food in the house. Already at seventeen Marlena is an alcoholic, she trades sexual favors to obtain drugs, and although smart she skips school.

For eight brief months, Cat became a part of Marlena and her world-- the 'best days ever'-- with a group of friends who accepted her, her life with filled danger and excitement.

****

By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan's population--Mom loved that statistic--were on food stamps. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Michigan ranks 4th in the country for drug problems, with heroin and cocaine in Detroit and opioids everywhere else. An estimated 20% of Michigan adults drink to excess and 24% of young men are binge drinkers. Beer is everywhere; the state ranks number 10 in the number of IPA breweries in the country.

The Pere Marquette River in Baldwin, Lakes County, the poorest county in Michigan

Michigan has its urban centers mired in job loss and poverty, the racist legacy of redlining and 'urban renewal' with its wholesale destruction of African American neighborhoods. Pontiac, Cat's hometown before they move to Silver Lake, has a poverty rate of 34%.

But the rural Up North communities also are impoverished. I just returned from a trip to Lake, Roscommon, and Ogemaw Counties with poverty rates over 28%, higher than the state average of 24%. Michigan ranks as one of the worst six states in the nation for the number of children living in poverty--one in five.

There are also pockets of great wealth located in Oakland County where I live, including Bloomfield Hills, one of the top 20 richest cities in the country.

Meadowbrook Hall, the second largest private home in America, built in Oakland Co, MI by the heir to the Dodge fortune

The city where my grandparents lived in the 1960s is now one of the ten wealthiest cities in the state, where I grew up is number 15, and my current city is number 30. These suburbs were built to house workers in the auto industry, from the top brass to the union workers like my dad. Their playground became the small 'Up North' towns--modest cabins for the middle class, posh resort homes and yachts in a marina for the 1%.

My dad's cabin

These remote villages and towns became dependant on tourism, the hunters and fishers and snowmobilers and skiers and family vacationers. So that side by side, for a few weeks each year, the very wealthy live amongst the local poor. And then the economy plummeted, and the working and middle classes could not afford the cabins and vacations Up North.

Summertime transformed northern Michigan. Kewaunee swelled to twice its normal size. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Pentwater Lake

We spent two years in a resort community on Lake Michigan. Between July 1 and the end of August the town was filled with campers at the state park and the Methodist campground, cottagers, bed and breakfast tourists, and people living on their sailboats in the marina. At summer's end, everything closed. Anyone who had enough money left town for their winter homes in Texas or Arizona or Florida or even Metro Detroit. Several bars were open, and the bank and post office. The one grocery store that catered to the marina kept half the store open for basics. In winter 193 inches of snow fell.

Years before we lived there, we used to go to the Methodist family camp. We were impressed by the beauty of the lake and marina, the channel feeding into Lake Michigan with its gorgeous sand beaches.

The beach at Pentwater

One day when I was in town checking out the tourist shops and ice cream parlors I remarked to a teenager that it must be a beautiful place to live. He scowled in answer. It wasn't until we lived there that I realized how isolated and boring a place it had to be to grow up in. Graduation class sizes were in the teens, the entire K-12 school system had about 260 students.

Lake Michigan at Pentwater

When we left Philadelphia when our son was two I thought a small town would be a wonderful place to raise our son. It turns out that Mayberry doesn't exist. Maybe it never did exist.

*****

As I read Marlena I wondered how much I had missed, all the different places we had moved and stayed a few years, never really understanding the community that deeply. I worked with teens but what did I know about their lives? One boy in the inner city of Philadelphia told me I did not understand real life. Pacifism did not work on the streets where one didn't get mad, one got even. In a small rural town, our son would ask why classmates could not read, had no telephones or books at home, or why their dads were in jail.

I remembered 'my' Marlena, a gregarious and confident girl from a well-to-do family who took the 14-year-old me under her wing--I was the new girl in school--and encouraged me to be outgoing, lose weight, have fun. She dropped me, age 15, and a year later I saw her going through the school hallway, her books held close against her chest, eyes straight ahead, slightly leaning forward in a fast walk. She put purple chalk on her eyelids in the restroom before school. She had changed. Years later I stopped by her home. Her brother told me she had married three times and lived in an Up North small town; her mother didn't remember which one, but it started with an M.

Cat is filled with nostalgia for that moment in time when she first felt alive and a part of something. And she is filled with survivor's guilt and regret. She struggles with alcoholism which might destroy the life she has built. What she experienced was horrendous; she saw the destruction of a smart and beautiful and courageous girl, a girl she wanted to be.

Just one girl, one fictional girl.

How many thousands across Michigan are we losing today? To human trafficking. To opioid addiction, meth, heroin, alcohol. To poverty, sexual abuse... How many across the country, the world?

What impressed me about Marlena was the story and the voice and the Michigan places and the heartbreaking REALNESS of it all. I am glad I finally read it.