There’s a simple and effective metaphor so integral to Briana Loewinsohn’s Ephemera that one might as well consider it the memoir’s central narrative. Concerning itself with Loewinsohn’s troubled relationship with her distant, unwell mother, the book obsesses over gardening; returning to her childhood home, our unnamed avatar finds the garden unruly, unwell itself. Tending to these fickle but resilient plants instills Loewninsohn’s narrative with an understanding of nurturing that she never knew in childhood.
As the title might imply, Ephemera is a book more about transitory feeling than it is a chronicle of concrete events – it is a book about a fleeting understanding of the past, a brief acceptance, if not forgiveness itself. It’s a quiet, introspective book – what few lines of dialogue there are occur in flashbacks, pockets of memory. Time and its passage are intangible, pointedly lost in the character’s unsureness of her own past; likewise, her presence in the garden as an adult is unmoored from her life. We are not given context to these events, there is no presence of a life outside this space. Like memories of childhood, everything is more about a feeling than an exactitude.
If all of this seem nebulous, that’s because it is. Loewinsohn has gone to great lengths to eliminate narrative clutter, to cut ties to traditional narrative. The delicate cartooning makes elaborate studies of plants, washing them – and the world around them – in monochromatic palettes, obfuscating the book’s central tragedy with a tight, dreamlike focus. What happened is rarely as important as how those events felt in their passing.
That tragedy is palpable despite its vaguery; children neglected, living under the frightful shadow of absence, a mother made frightening in her sorrow. For anyone familiar with the pains of depression, both living with it and living beside it, Ephemera nearly overwhelms with its stinging accuracy. There is a feeling of having lost something – potential, understanding, warmth – and an understanding that, try as we might, we’ll never quite be able to reclaim it.
Loewinsohn has achieved something of a concentrated burst of melancholic distillation; each page of Ephemera feels accurate, felt real. Like the best memoir, it centers the reader so uniquely near the experiences of another that it feels as if the reader themselves have experienced them, as well. It does it without the complicated trappings of literary detail; indeed, it does it with as few words and as little complication as possible.
Resolution can’t be found, exactly, but it can be achingly near at hand, just out of reach. Ephemeral.
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