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Essay / An Analysis Of 'Remember Me...' by Brett Anthony Johnston
Hardcover: 384 pagesPublisher: Random House (May 13, 2014)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1400062128ISBN-13: 978-1400062126Lost and FoundPeter BirkenheadWe See Them on the news, holding pictures of girls who never came down to breakfast. Or huddled in airports, waiting for information about mysteriously missing planes. We spot them napping on cramped couches in intensive care units, or rocking back and forth on courtroom benches – wondering what they did to deserve to be thrown to the drift, within sight but out of reach of land; wondering how it is possible that time neither continues nor ends happily, but simply stops. In Brett Anthony Johnston's quietly devastating novel Remember Me Like This, "they" are Laura and Eric Campbell, including son Justin Campbell, 11 at the time of his birth. disappearance, has been missing from his home in Southport, Texas, for four years. They continue to post flyers in store windows in town and nearby Corpus Christie, continue to search missing children's websites, continue to celebrate Justin's birthday and buy him Christmas presents. But they're barely holding on. Their bonds with each other fray, eaten away by fatigue, guilt and corrosive hope. They speak in broken sentences that barely hint at the cacophony of their inner lives. Laura channels hyper-attentive, almost frantic energy to monitor a sick dolphin in an animal rescue lab. She takes the ferry across the bay late at night. She steals bottles of nail polish, cuts her palms and wrists with seashells, and throws sweet tea in the face of a stranger who tells her, "I'm still so broken about your boy." » Eric, a high school history teacher, was, in the words of a n...... middle of paper ...... there until nightfall and he was able to go down the ladder in the dark. [...] She wanted to slap him to wake him up, because he seemed to have dreamed himself into a life that didn't exist. And yet, she couldn't remember a time when she loved him more. This is the kind of love that can, eventually, prevail. Hard fought, lucid, humane. The love of people who see themselves, and who deserve to be more visible in our literature. Remember Me Like This ends with an epilogue that unites Campbell's expansive post-storm voices in a tentative series of unanswered questions, a perfect grace note that evokes the book's most arresting and indelible image: of four terrified creatures and broken people sitting around a kitchen table, driven by an impulse beyond their comprehension to reach out, close their eyes and bow their heads.