Alison Smith

Times (London) - April 16, 2004, Friday

SECTION: Features; 6

LENGTH: 1821 words

HEADLINE: Lament for a lost brother

BYLINE: Penny Wark

BODY:

TWENTY YEARS AFTER HER BROTHER'S DEATH IN A CAR CRASH, ALISON SMITH HAS PUBLISHED A COMPELLING MEMOIR OF SIBLING LOVE, RELIGIOUS FAMILY GUILT AND FORBIDDEN PASSION. PENNY WARK MEETS HER

 

THE GRIEF CUT IN when she was least expecting it. Climbing a tree, which she had done hundreds of times before, was suddenly impossible. She froze, couldn't do it.

 

"You become frightened of ordinary things," she says. "There's also this walking around the house just touching objects. You touch the sofa and feel the nap of the upholstery because something so primal has been taken from you that you don't know if the world is still there, and it was almost an offence that it was. How could the world continue when this boy had been taken?"

 

Alison Smith was 15 when her brother Roy died in a car crash. He was 18, the shy big brother who taught her to go into the woods, to build things, to explore, to read books. "He opened up a life in my mind, a life of work not as duty but as an inspiration, a way of finding meaning in the world. I was seen as the good girl, polite and quiet, sweet and pretty, I'd make somebody a nice wife and mother. I think he saw me as funny and daring, a troublemaker with a mind like his that just wanted to open and open and open."

 

They were so close that their mother called them Alroy. When Roy died, their parents, deeply loving and openly good people, retreated into their Catholic faith. Smith understood their grief, though not, at the time, her own. But over the past six years she has dissected and made sense of her feelings by writing a memoir that describes the three years that followed Roy's death.

 

Name All the Animals is an eloquent, taut and unsentimental expression of the intensity of a strong sibling relationship. It explains what it is like to grow up in an American suburb that is also an insular Catholic community, full of benign intent yet shot through with prejudice. It is a story about the passion of first love, and a plea for acceptance because that love was taboo. But it is primarily a book about grief and the isolation that results. For this reason it has been compared with the most recent bestselling examination of grief, Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones. Possibly because it is a real story, Smith's is more direct and powerful: "Grief can blind you; it pulls loose the seam of memory. It weakens your senses," she writes.

 

Smith is 35, a former worker in the voluntary sector and more recently a dishwasher; she lives in Brooklyn and has yet to acquire the expensive gloss of the successful author. She is unassuming and surprised by the praise her first book has attracted. She talks as precisely as she writes, and even though writing has brought her comfort, the rawness of her feelings is still apparent.

 

Roy died in the family's camper van when it caught fire after an accident. The next day the local paper in Brighton, Rochester, New York State, reported his death in crass detail. Smith's parents thought it best that she should never read the article and that she should pray instead and so began a domestic regime in which Roy informed everything that happened in the household, but was not discussed. Smith's father, an Irish Catholic factory worker, carried his statue of St Jude around the house and spoke to it; her mother, a secretary, washed Roy 's clean clothes in the middle of the night. Within three weeks she had bought a camper van of the same make and model as the one in which he died, and refitted its interior to make it identical. This then stood in the family's drive as though nothing had changed.

 

"My parents had these very physical dramatic responses of denial to their child's death," Smith says. "They were extraordinarily private people, which is one of the reasons Roy and I were so close. We were not allowed to join the swim team or playgroups; my parents told us to play together in the back yard. Then this happened and they were thrust centre stage in this tiny community and they were scrutinised and it brought them a great deal of shame. First because they had not protected their child, as they saw it, and second because they didn't like to have emotion in public. So they became very private with their grief, and because they couldn't talk to anyone about it they came up with strange rituals."

 

Smith, a child with a highly developed imagination, had never found it difficult to accept the presence of God, who, in her community, seemed as tangible as cars and the laws of gravity. It was natural for her to talk to Jesus: "He was my most intimate friend. He walked with me to the school bus, he helped me fall asleep by sitting on the end of the bed. So when Roy died I had to talk to him.

 

"I went into the upstairs bathroom, the only place where I could be alone, and I asked Jesus 'Where's Roy?' Jesus was there. He looked like a children's Bible illustration with his long robes sitting on the edge of the tub, and he wouldn't look at me. He just stood up and walked away. I never saw Jesus again. For me that was the end of faith, the removal of a great gift, a great organising principle in my life."

 

Thus Smith felt the shame of being an atheist in a community where it was unusual not to believe in this unseen, unmaterial world. This became the first of many secrets she kept from her parents. The next involved food. She and Roy had always shared food and when he died she began to push half of each meal off her plate into a paper bag on her lap, and took it to the fort behind the garage where they had played. The food disappeared, eaten, she later discovered, by a stray dog.

 

"I wanted to get back to Roy and I don't think I lost my mind, but I came close because you had to let go of certain kinds of logic. Grief does that to you. I thought maybe he didn't die, maybe he ran away into the road where the accident happened. Maybe he was going to come back." Gradually more and more of her food was given to Roy, "until I was giving up almost all my food to the memory of my brother. I was eating memory instead of food."

 

Surely her parents noticed that their daughter was grief-stricken and anorexic? They didn't, not because they weren't loving parents, she believes, but because alongside their instinct to protect her was a desire to keep her childlike and innocent.

 

"For them I became a physical manifestation of their denial. They refused to see my anorexia, and although I'm certain there's no way in which they wished harm for me I do think on a subconscious level this worked for them because it meant I stopped developing. Somehow they wanted to keep my mind pure and my body small because then I was this physical reminder that time was not passing. I didn't grow up for them."

 

For her, the process had another significance: if she could disappear, perhaps she could be with Roy. Her next project was learning to drive so that on the third anniversary of Roy's death she could put on his clothes and take the replica camper van to the place where he died, and try to follow him. "Could I go through some door in time and find him? For a younger sibling, surpassing the age at which Roy died was very challenging. I was always the second-place kid, the tagalong. I almost couldn't bear to go past 18, the age at which Roy died. We were so merged it seemed biologically impossible. I thought, that's when I will die."

 

Did she want to die?

 

"I wanted to die, yes. I wanted to be with Roy. If the choice was, you can have the known world or you can have an unknown world where it is guaranteed that Roy is there as he was in life, I'll go with Roy. I think a lot of people would have chosen that because he was a great guy." So, at 5.55am, the time Roy died, she drove to the scene of the accident and waited for an old blue Dodge with bald tyres to swerve into her. Nothing happened. And only then did she feel a sense of permission, and a will, to live without him.

 

All this had happened without her parents' knowledge, and there had been one more secret: a girl called Terry, who, like Roy, stimulated her intellectually. She was a troublemaker too, which in the world of Smith's convent school meant that she read Colette rather than Austen. Together they began to misbehave, sneaking into the woods around their convent school where they discovered a secret swimming pool used by the nuns, and then sneaking to meet at night while their parents slept.

 

For the first time since Roy's death, Smith wanted something.

 

"After a year or so it finally dawned on us that we were falling in love. I kissed her behind the statue of the virgin on the second floor and that kiss was...

 

I'll never forget it. It was surprising and a wonderful and terrifying moment for me. Boy, was I lucky. I had learnt from Roy to go towards what was compelling, what was intellectually interesting without thinking, is this proper, it it good, is it what the Church wants?"

 

Predictably, perhaps, her mother was appalled by her daughter's love for another girl. "Lesbians will burn in Hell," she told Smith. "I think she believed she was trying to save me from eternal damnation and permanent psychological damage. And maybe I needed her to say that to me so that I could run into the woods and sit there in the pouring rain and think for the first time, was she right? Maybe my parents didn't know what they were talking about all the time. I still struggle with whether I might burn in Hell but it was the first moment I started questioning this very insular Catholic world I lived in."

 

Smith's father accepts his daughter's sexuality but her mother struggled with it until she died last year. "When she would speak to me she had a code for what we would talk about. "If I had a new friend she would say, 'Would I like her?' I had to answer no if there was lesbian content, yes if it was safe for my mother. I swallowed this unspoken rule and told her the truth."

 

Smith broke this rule only once, when her mother was ill and asked if she would like her daughter's book. "I said, 'Mom I think you'd love it,' because I have to believe that's the truth."

 

Talking about this makes Smith's eyes fill with tears. I try to reassure her that her book is a fine achievement, that it articulates a universal emotion, and that her mother would be proud of her for writing it.

 

"She was a woman who loved life, she loved to celebrate, and I wish she could celebrate with us." Her voice still quivering, she says that many people have told her that they have read her book after losing a sibling, or that they are gay, and that it has given them a vocabulary to express their feelings to their mothers.

 

"That made me so glad I didn't die in that van that day. Whoever gets such a gift that their life could have a purpose?"

 

Name All the Animals, Scribner, £12.99, available from Books First at £10 plus £2.25 p&p. Call 0870 1608080

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People - February 23, 2004

SECTION: PICKS & PANS/BOOKS; Pg. 45

LENGTH: 243 words

HEADLINE: Name All the Animals; by Alison Smith

BYLINE: Ellen Shapiro

BODY: CRITIC'S CHOICE

MEMOIR

 

Smith's vigorously Catholic family might not have been accomplished, but they certainly knew how to keep the faith. In their loving but insular world, not believing in God was "like saying you didn't believe in oatmeal, or motorcars, or the laws of gravity." Fifteen-year-old Alison and her older brother Roy would wake up each morning as their father blessed them with holy relics, and Alison routinely had visions of Jesus, whom she considered her most intimate friend.

 

But her faith is horribly challenged when, weeks before he plans to start college, Roy is suddenly killed in a car crash. This intimate and quietly piercing memoir describes three years of Alison's adolescence in Rochester, N.Y., as she struggles with her grief. At first she is unmoored--refusing food, compulsively reading and aimlessly roaming the halls of Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls, where the nuns prescribe prayer and a stint at the state hospital teaching lobotomy patients how to sew. A respite comes from the ancient Sister Aggie, who shows Alison how to put her head down the laundry chute and uncork a good, therapeutic scream. But it is not until she begins a clandestine love affair with a more worldly girl at school that Alison starts to emerge from her brother's shadow. With a clear eye and an unsentimental heart, Smith writes a deeply moving elegy about devastating loss and how it can be redeemed.

 

GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT JONES, Smith's impressive debut traces the line between grief and faith following a fatal accident.; COLOR PHOTO: STILL-LIFE: JOHN

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Kirkus Reviews

An impressive debut memoir of grief and growing up. In 1984, when the author was only 15, her 18-year-old brother Roy was burned to death in an automobile crash. Her struggle to come to terms with this loss and find her way again is recounted here with a clear eye and astonishing frankness. Smith's parents were staunch Catholics; not to believe in the existence of God, she writes, would have been like not believing in "oatmeal, or motorcars, or the laws of gravity." With her brother's death, Alison's faith suddenly vanished, to be replaced by study and reading. If only she could understand how space, time, light, and movement were linked in the fourth dimension, she believed, Roy would come back to her. Smith's parents, however, clung to their faith; her father still blessed her each morning with a holy relic to keep her safe. The author's observations of her parents' reaction to the loss of their only son are marked by a cool objectivity and filled with telling detail. Inexplicably, they seemed to be unaware that their grief-stricken remaining child was starving herself and wandering outside at all hours of the night. Smith's mother, it seems, was an expert at rewriting the past and pretending that unwanted events did not actually happen. At Sisters of Mercy High School, the nuns overlooked Alison's strange or out-of-line behaviors. When she fell in love with another girl and the two of them were discovered in bed together, only her companion's reputation suffered. The nuns and her classmates saw Smith as "the girl whose brother died," more to be pitied than censured. For months before the third anniversary of Roy's death, the tagalong little sister, now 18 and not wanting to surpass herbig brother, planned to reenact the accident, following him into death. Her attempt failed, her appetite for life returned, and Roy finally became a ghost figure for Alison, if not for her parents. Powerful, unsentimental, candid, and moving.

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Library Journal

In this memoir, a top book for Scribner, Smith recalls grappling with her brother's death as a teenager.

Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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United Methodist Church Press (UMC.org)

Name All the Animals: A Memoir

Author: Alison Smith

Publisher: Scribner

Page Count: 319 (hardcover)

By Rev. Mark Ralls

 

(UMCom) -- As a child, Alison had two great certainties in her life. One was Roy. Confident and good-natured, he was the ideal older brother. And, she, "pliant, perpetually ill-informed, and stubbornly naive," made the "perfect little sister." Inseparable, they built a fort where nobody else was allowed and invented games like "ghost baseball" where no one else was necessary. They were so close that their mother even gave them a single pet name to share - "Alroy."

 

And, losing faith is not surrendering some bland set of beliefs. What we lose is God.

 

Alison was also certain of Jesus Christ. Her faith took root in a "great flood plane of belief" where an unusually devout family merged with a supportive Catholic community; a place where not believing in God was like refusing to believe in "oatmeal, or motorcars, or the laws of gravity." Here, Christ was more than an abstract savior. He was Alison's "most intimate friend, ... more real" to her than even the other kids she met at school.

 

Name All the Animals: A Memoir is Alison Smith's tender account of what it is like to lose both of these certainties in a single day. When she was fifteen, Roy was killed in an automobile accident. Seeking solace from Christ, Alison receives nothing but silence. Her description of the day Roy vanished and Jesus walked out of her life reminds us that the categories we use to explain such experiences are insufficient. We never merely suffer grief. Instead, we lose those who once made us complete. And, losing faith is not surrendering some bland set of beliefs. What we lose is God. Such deep, personal losses are literally heart breaking. In this her first book, Smith invites us to walk with her through a journey of loss, allowing us to experience the painful unraveling of faith and hope.

 

Yet, despite its tragic theme, Name All the Animals never dissolves into despair. It is a witness to the tenacity of love. It displays the love of a community. When Roy dies, family friends overcome their own feelings of helplessness with touching expressions of concern. One of the most powerful scenes describes how neighbors rushed to the Smith home as soon as they heard the news. "They just got in their cars and drove to us, or opened their front doors, forgetting to close them, walked into our yard, and stood there... . Mrs. Henderson wore only one earring. Mrs. Wilson clutched a telephone to her chest, the wall cord trailing behind her as she ran across the street."

 

To call this memoir an impressive debut by a gifted young writer would be to underestimate both the book and its author. It is, I believe, a work of art.

 

It is also an intimate tale of romantic love. Alongside the story of Roy's death, Smith artfully weaves a coming of age memoir about her first love. The confusing power of her attraction is multiplied by its scandalous nature in her traditional Catholic community. And, like many first loves, it both wounds and heals.

 

Most of all, this book is about family love. The ties that bind mother, father and sister to a lost young man are never severed. And, the three who are left doggedly choose to love even when they cannot fully understand. This wonderful memoir serves as a flesh and blood portrait of 1 Corinthians 13. It reminds us that somehow through it all, some measure of faith, hope and love abide, but, without a doubt, the greatest of these is love.

 

To call this memoir an impressive debut by a gifted young writer would be to underestimate both the book and its author. It is, I believe, a work of art. Like all true art, the gifts of the artist are abundantly evident but never allowed to distract from the work itself. Alison Smith tells her story in some of the most beautifully crafted prose I have ever read. Yet, in the end, it is the beauty of the story itself that shines through. When I finished this book, I didn't just feel admiration. I felt grateful, and I think you will too.

 

Share your comments about this book with other readers. Link to online discussion, please begin the discussion with the following question: Have there been times in your life when you've felt as if you've lost your faith? If so, how did you work through it?

 

The Rev. Mark Ralls is senior pastor of St. Timothy United Methodist Church, Brevard, N.C

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Time Out - April 21, 2004

 SECTION: Pg. 56

LENGTH: 270 words

HEADLINE: 'Name all the Animals: A Memoir of the Child Left Behind' Alison Smith Scribner GBP 12.99;

Books: Preview - Book of the week

BODY:

 

Until the age of 15, Alison Smith's mother rarely called her Alison.

 

She called her Alroy, because, close as Alison was to her brother Roy, it seemedeasier to amalgamate the two names, so seldom were they apart. But one stormy morning in July 1984, Alison wakes to discover her beloved brother has been killed in a car crash. From this moment, sundered from her only soulmate, she isforced to reconfigure not only her name, but her entire existence.

 

While her devoutly Catholic parents crumble into a crisis of grief and faith, Alison assumes the role of coping daughter. She must appear to 'move on' and, thanks to some secret habits, she does. As well as registering the 'number of moments' since he died 'I calculated 15 months, 65 weeks, 456 days, 10,944 hours, 656,640 minutes' Alison also starts saving her food at night and leaving it in the garden for Roy. Perhaps, she muses, she would have stopped 'but for this one fact:

mysteriously, miraculously, the food disappeared'. These moments of communion with him allow her to appear 'normal' during the day.

 

Smith's memoir segues effortlessly between the 'Before' time and the 'After ', sorather than uniformly linear, her recollection feels fresh and real. While some of her memories are terrible to read, there are enough joyful anecdotes that thebook never feels selfpityingly indulgent (as well it might). This is Smith's first book, but if her quite beautiful consciousness of the world, of love, loss, and the unfathomable bond between human beings dead and alive is anything to go by, she's one to watch.

Clemency Burton-Hill

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The Observer - April 4, 2004

 SECTION: Observer Review Pages, Pg. 17

LENGTH: 380 words

HEADLINE: Review: Books: MEMOIR: The aftermath of brotherly love

BYLINE: URSULA KENNY

BODY:

 

NAME ALL THE ANIMALS

By Alison Smith

Scribner £12.99, pp320

 

ALISON Smith and her brother, Roy, are so close that their mother calls them by one name - Alroy. Theirs is a sunny, close-knit life in the suburbs of America until, one day, when Alison is 15 and Roy 18, he is killed in a car crash. Name All the Animals is a beautifully written memoir that describes fluently and painfully how the living respond to the random cruelty of life. It details what happens next to 'the child left behind' and her parents.

 

At almost the moment Roy falls out of Alison's life, the turbulent world of adolescence crashes in (her first period starts the day before his death) and her journey to adulthood is made more intense and alienating by the grief which feeds and corrupts, so that she grows increasingly skewed. Unable to accept what has happened, she just waits for Roy to come back.

 

She waits for him at night in the 'fort' they built at the bottom of the garden. She stops eating so she can leave food out for him. She calls the people she meets who haven't heard about the tragedy 'the Before People' and takes joy and comfort from their innocence.

 

Alison steps so far into the life of a dead boy 'that the path back to the living world seemed impassable'. Meanwhile, her parents smother her - she is the only 15-year-old who has to have her hand held by an adult when she crosses the road - but fail to see her. She has anorexia and is wasting away before their eyes but her mother bundles her off to the local ER where she tells a doctor her daughter's most troubling symptom is that she reads too much.

 

The book has been compared to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones in its evocation of grief, but where The Lovely Bones can feel manipulative, Smith's writing pulls no strings and communicates more powerfully.

 

Moments stand out. When Alison's parents first find out about Roy, concerned friends and neighbours flock to the house. Her father tries to escape upstairs but halfway there he stops and 'lowers himself on to the middle step' where he remains, apparently oblivious, for the afternoon, a potent expression of shock and inertia.

 

To order Name All the Animals for £10.99 plus p&p, call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989

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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (LONDON) - April 4, 2004, Sunday

SECTION: Review Pg. 04

LENGTH: 1941 words

HEADLINE: Why wasn't I allowed to grieve too? Her parents received 400 sympathy cards when her brother Roy died; Alison Smith got one. She recalls life as a 'bit player' in their bereavement - and how, as an adult, she finally faced up to her own loss

BYLINE: by Alison Smith

BODY:

It was the summer I got my first period. I was 15. I wanted to be an ice-skater, like the famous Norwegian Sonja Henie. When I wasn't at the rink practising my figures, I tagged along behind my big brother, Roy, telling jokes, trying to get him to laugh. I kept secret count of the number of days left before Roy would leave for his first year at college. We were down to day 28 on the morning in late July that two plain-clothed officers came by the house and told us Roy had died in a car accident.

 

I ran when the officers told us - slammed out the front door, tore down the street. The rain soaked through my slippers. One of the officers came after me. He caught up with me in front of the Wilsons' house, grabbed my shoulder, and pulled me to him. His large hands lay heavy on my thin arms. "They need you," he said.

 

"Who?"

 

"Your parents. They need you now. To be strong."

 

My parents received more than 400 sympathy cards. I received one - from my figure-skating instructor. I remember the white-on-white embossed lettering on the cover. I remember that she used the phrase "your brother" twice - as if I actually owned a piece of him. As if this loss - my parents' greatest tragedy - was also mine.

 

The day he died, shortly after the news hit, friends and relatives arrived at the house. As they burst through the front door - wild-eyed, calling my mother's name - I followed behind, picking up their umbrellas and purses. I waited as they wept on Mother's shoulder. When they finished, they asked for coffee. There was none. The adults were in no condition to brew coffee. So I found the directions under the lid of "Mr Coffee" and got to work. I didn't talk to the adults much - mostly I just asked if they took cream and sugar. When anyone spoke directly to me, it was to ask how I thought "they" were coping. "Are you taking good care of them?" they asked. And then: "They are so lucky to have you. You are all they have left now."

 

For a while, my parents were big news in our town. The subject of concern, compassion, scrutiny and gossip - the tragic death of their son thrust them centre stage in our small Catholic community. As I watched the drama unfold around them, I receded into the background. Without my brother there to stand up for me, I lost my place in the family.

 

As children, Roy and I had been close from the beginning - practically inseparable. We were so constantly together that my mother had combined our first names into a single shorthand. She called us both Alroy. Now, it seemed, there was no name for me. I became a bit player, an afterthought in the story of our family.

 

At the time, I did not mind this overwhelming focus on my parents. In fact, I rather preferred it. It allowed me to imagine that Roy had not left me; he had only left my parents. If I could palm this off to Mum and Dad, if they could be the ones at the centre of this terrible situation, I thought that I might not have to face it. So I started to disappear. And no one seemed to miss me.

 

I hid out at night in the fort that Roy and I had made behind our garage, and made plans for his return. Throughout our childhood, Roy and I had built four forts on that same secret spot. He was a perfectionist and each spring he insisted we tear down the old one and start from scratch. Every day from the first sign of spring, all through the summer and deep into the chilly fall, we spent hours in the back yard together - designing and measuring, hammering and sawing - building our own private kingdoms.

 

During the last weeks of his life, Roy had told me about a concept called the fourth dimension. "Space and time are linked," he had said as he hooked his fingers together. "Indissolubly."

 

He repeated it. "Indissolubly, Al. They can never be separated."

 

After he died I would sit in the fort and say this word. Indissolubly. I rolled the word on my tongue, enjoying the soft roundness of it, its opaque meaning. I believed that somehow it was the word that linked him to me. I believed that there was a secret code in it, and if I could somehow break it, Roy would come back.

 

Meanwhile, my parents went back to work. They answered all 400-and-odd sympathy cards. They attended church. They smiled at the neighbours. Father mowed the lawn. Mother weeded the garden. They returned to normal - under such close scrutiny, they felt they had to.

 

Behind closed doors, things were different. I watched as my parents sleepwalked through their days, staring into the middle distance. They stayed up all night, pacing the halls. My mother pulled Roy's clean clothes out of his wardrobe, piled them in the hamper, brought them down to the basement and washed them. My father acquired a small plastic statue of St Jude from the St Jude Society in Chicago and carried this "Saint of Hopeless Causes" around the house. They lost their taste for food, for games, for any kind of fun.

 

From my 15-year-old perspective, grief was a lot like my Great Aunt Bertha - I knew I had to see her once a year at family reunions, but I did everything I could to steer clear of her. So I refused to accept that I had lost Roy. Like a broken record, I kept repeating the same phrase - "He'll come back, he'll come back." I sat in the fort every night for three years and I waited for him.

 

I thought I had grief licked, but I hadn't noticed how much I had changed in those three years. During the day, I had trouble concentrating. I would stare at the pages of my favorite novels and the words would float in front of my eyes, devoid of meaning. My friends seemed far away and preoccupied with petty thoughts. I stopped skating. I stopped believing in God. At night, I would lie in bed, hold my breath, and try to will myself to disappear, like Roy had. Then, I stumbled upon a real disappearing act - I stopped eating. By the time I went off to college, I weighed less than 6 1/2 stone.

 

Leaving home was good for me. I joined a theatre troupe. I got a job running after-school reading for inner-city youth. I thought I was getting on with my life. But I found myself weeping at the most unlikely moments - on buses, at birthday parties, backstage before my entrances. I did not understand why I was crying. Rather than trying to get to the bottom of all this sadness, I made a joke out of it. I fancied myself a mysterious and tortured person. I decided to become a writer.

 

I showed my early stories to an author whose work I admired. He told me that he found them technically proficient. "But," he said, "I don't really care about anyone in them. There's not much emotion here. Why don't you write about your own life?"

 

The first thing I wrote about was my mother watching Roy drive away on that final morning. That summer, Roy had a job working the early-morning groundsman shift at the local golf course. He usually left the house before mother and I woke up. But that morning in late July, when my mother heard the engine turn over in the car, she got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and watched Roy behind the wheel of the car. She kept him in her sight as he backed down the driveway and pulled out onto the rain-soaked street.

 

Even though this scene was vivid in my mind, I had not been there. My mother had told me about it later. It's a powerful image: the mother's final glimpse of her child. But it's not mine. Then I wrote about my father losing his only son, his namesake. This is a true tragedy, a genuine heartbreaker. But it wasn't my story either.

 

Still, I kept writing about my parents, about all that they had lost when Roy died. I stayed awake most nights writing and fell into bed at dawn, slept for a few fitful hours and then walked down the hill to the restaurant where I worked as a waitress. I was sleepwalking through the days. At work, I mixed up the lunch orders. I delivered coffee when customers asked for tea. I started to wonder what was wrong with me. I imagined that I had a mysterious, exotic virus.

 

Two years later, I showed what I had written to a friend. When she had finished she asked: "Where are you in this story?"

 

I was indignant. "It's obvious. I'm telling it!"

 

She shook her head: "I don't think you are." She flipped through the pages. "I mean, where were you?"

 

I thanked her for her time and took my manuscript home in a huff. "I am on every page," I muttered to myself. "It's my voice, my point of view."

 

As I re-read it, my heart sank. In every family moment, from the joy of his birth to the horror of the day Roy died, I had written myself out of the story. I had become a camera recording every movement, every sound, every gesture - but I could not turn the lens around and focus it on myself.

 

I opened a new file on my computer. I stared at the blank screen. Then I closed my eyes for a moment and started typing.

 

I wrote about the nights I would sneak out to the fort. About, Shadow, the stray dog that visited me every night in the dark yard. The dog and I would lie on the grass and stare into the branches of the trees and wait for the night to pass. I wrote about the secret stash of food. Every night, at the dinner table, I slid my dinner off my plate, one forkful at a time, and slipped it into the open mouth of a greasy paper bag hidden on my lap. While mother and father watched the news, I deposited the food in the fort. It was for Roy.

 

A year later, I showed the manuscript to my friend again. She read it in one night. Her eyes were bright when she brought it over the next morning. She dropped it on the kitchen table next to my bowl of Cheerios. "Now you're getting somewhere."

 

We tell stories in order to make sense of our lives. They help us understand our past. When Roy died, I lost not only my brother, I lost big parts of myself. Who I was: the silly, sloppy, eager, chatty, tag-along little sister. Grief does that to you. It makes you lose the thread of your own story. What made it even harder was that no one else around me seemed to understand where I fitted into this story. In our culture, the grieving parent is honoured. It is understood that this is the worst thing that can happen to you - the loss of a child. It is worse than your own death. What we fail to realise is that the siblings grieve just as deeply.

 

When I wrote the book, I realised that there was no avoiding grief. I could no longer give it the slip the way I had Great Aunt Bertha at all those family reunions. In fact, if I was going to write this book, I was going to have to walk right up to grief and let it kiss me on both cheeks.

 

It took me six years to finish the book. And in describing what I had lost when Roy died - this beautiful, funny, hardworking, extraordinary yet completely ordinary big brother - I also told the story of everything I had. The joy of forts and card games and night-time escapades. Of sledging parties and skating on the frozen pond.

 

In the winter of that last year, when I was on my eighteenth draft and I knew I was nearing the end, I looked up from my desk one afternoon, out at the falling snow. I turned off my computer. I dug my old ice skates out of the back of my closet and brushed them off. The leather had grown stiff with age and lack of use. I slung them over my shoulder and walked down to the local pond.

 

I had not worn the skates since I was 15, since the day before Roy died. I laced them up and stepped onto the frozen pond. My ankles bowed at first. Then I pulled myself up, pushed off and made my way across the ice. I was no Sonja Henie, but I was on my way.

 

Name all the Animals, by Alison Smith (Scribner), is available for pounds 11.99 plus pounds 2.25 p&p from Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.

 

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The New York Times - Book Review - March 21, 2004

Name All the Animals':

Half of AlRoy

 

By ELISSA SCHAPPELL

 

New York Times Book Review

Published: March 21, 2004

 

The best memoirs accost you, and like a stranger in a late-night diner they tell their stories in a way that makes time stand still and your coffee go cold beside you. Alison Smith's ''Name All the Animals,'' a portrait of her family's grief in the wake of her brother's death, does just that.

 

Alison and her older brother, Roy, were so close growing up that their mother called them by one name, Alroy. The summer of his death, Roy was about to enter college as an engineering student; Alison, 15, would be continuing on at convent school. That summer, like every other summer, the two erected a fort, a private refuge, in the woods behind their house. One afternoon, while out exploring, they discovered a deserted house that appeared to have had the front half ripped away, ''as if a large claw had reached out of the sky and torn it clean off.''

 

When Roy is killed in a car accident later that summer, the Smith home is also ripped in two. Alison's parents, stunned and gasping, clutch at the rope of their faith in God. Her father prays to his small plastic statue of St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes), asking him to explain how such a thing could happen. After all, every morning of his children's lives he has appeared at their bedsides and touched their skin with relics to bless them. When Alison asked Roy why their father did this, he told her: ''He's got to name us, like Adam named all the animals. To keep track of them.''

 

But of course a father, no matter how much we imagine his godlike powers, cannot save his son, nor can he protect his daughter from losing her faith, a rift that leaves her parents on one side of the house and Alison on the other.

 

''Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in him. Instead I felt that God chose to exclude me from his world. Since I was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, I thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought I was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently, in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had I done, I asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with him?''

 

To atone for this imagined sin, Alison sneaks out to the fort at night to leave half her dinner for Roy. As if denying herself sustenance could somehow make up for Roy's death, or assuage the sadness that is literally wasting her to the bone. The food miraculously disappears, consumed by a stray dog named Shadow, a connection the reader easily makes but young Alison can't bear to.

 

''Someone -- or something -- ate it. I saw this as a sign. A message from Roy. During the day, I was just a normal schoolgirl. I did my homework. I went to work at the convent. I seemed to move on from this terrible tragedy. But at night, the distance between the living and the dead changes. At night, we persuade ourselves that the most impossible things are possible.''

 

By daylight life is different. A new girl appears in school, an artist, who turns Alison on to Colette and Sappho and other ''slim volumes of poetry,'' and soon a clandestine romance begins.

 

Smith's strength is in rendering the immediacy of grief and the wavering of religious conviction in the face of crisis. But because there is such a strong narrative pull, she sets up certain expectations that aren't completely met. We have no sense at the story's end whether Alison's affair with her classmate was a case of youthful schoolgirl love or something more. Was it an awakening, or simply an erotic byproduct of her grief?

 

Still, her evocation of a shattered family attempting to rebuild itself is unflinching. And in her portrait of the girl she was we can see the writer she became.

 

Elissa Schappell is the editor at large of Tin House magazine and the author of ''Use Me,'' a novel.

 

GRAPHIC: Photos: Alison Smith (Photo by Jerry Bauer/Scribner); Martha Tod Dudman (Photo by Stephen Rappaport/Simon & Schuster)

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ABA--Bookselling this Week - March 11, 2004

Name All the Animals: A Memoir of Grief and Redemption

March 11, 2004

Author Alison Smith

 

Given Alison Smith's background -- she hails from a long line of devout Catholics, who were blue-collar workers and teachers -- she was expected to become an educator herself, get married, keep her faith. She wasn't supposed to become a writer. To complicate things further, in her finely crafted memoir, Name All the Animals (Scribner), she writes about her brother Roy's accidental death, a subject the family rarely discussed, and her first lesbian experiences at Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls. Smith also broke with family tradition when she traded her religious faith for the temple of knowledge, preferring Jane Austen to Jesus.

 

"Both of my parents were not too keen on me becoming a writer," said Smith speaking on the phone from Rochester, New York, her hometown and the backdrop for Name All the Animals. "It was not in our culture. We became schoolteachers. My dad worked at the factory. They thought that [my becoming a writer] was a terribly bad idea."

 

Not that this caused a family rift or stopped her proud father from cheering at a reading in Rochester, or from bringing along 55 of his closest friends to show off his daughter's moving new memoir. "He's so excited. He really, really loves the book." Sadly, Smith's mother passed away last April.

 

BTW again caught up with Smith, who's 35, after a recent reading at the KGB Bar in New York City. A sort of elfin towhead, she conveyed a similar humor and earnestness when she made the post-reading rounds as she does with narrative voice in Name All the Animals.

 

Name All the Animals is Smith's debut book. She has contributed to McSweeney's and was resident at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, and has won a hailstorm of positive recognition. Name All the Animals is a Top Ten March/April 2004 Book Sense 76 pick. Carole Horne of Harvard Book Store had this to say about it, "This extraordinary account of the way the author's family coped with the accidental death of her brother and her own secret homosexuality is gripping, unsentimental, and amazingly accomplished. If Smith is able to do this in a first book, I can't wait for the next." New York Times' Janet Maslin called the book "literary and precise."

 

When she was 15, Smith's older brother Roy was killed in a car accident. He drove away in the rain and never came back, Smith told the audience at KGB. They spent so much time together building forts and squabbling over dishes that their mother referred to both of them with one nickname -- "Alroy." Smith responded to his death by burrowing deep inside herself, fluttering "between the dead and the living." And by reading feverishly, anything and everything. Along with Sense and Sensibility, there was A Syllabus of Mortuary Jurisprudence, Elizabethan Puritanism, Early Norse History, and many others. Smith essentially wrote and read herself back into the world.

 

During the creation of the book, she tried to not let herself get pigeonholed. "When writing, I didn't think about terms -- coming-of-age, grief memoir, coming out memoir -- I just tried to stick close to my experience." Smith explained how after the book is on the shelves "labels help so people can easily identify if they might connect with the book, but they don't help you when you're writing."

 

Smith took six years to complete the memoir, so naturally there were some significant revelations along the way. After 18 drafts, the first of which was an 800-page behemoth that included "everything from information about my grandparents' emigration from Denmark to what I had for breakfast," she whittled away about 500 pages and, Smith told BTW, "I discovered that I thought a lot about what my parents lost and not as much about what I lost." She finally got that her suffering was as important as her parents'. "Somewhere in year three I figured it out. I'm a slow learner," she said.

 

Knowing this led to one of the significant threads in the memoir and an additional impetus for Smith's telling the story of her adolescent life. Much of the book addresses family, identity, coming-of-age, grief, sexuality, but one theme Smith felt didn't get its due elsewhere was how brothers and sisters mourn. Smith explained, "I wanted to write for siblings because there's not enough attention paid to sibling grief. There's so much focus on what parents lose because they lose so much, but siblings are often put in position to make up for what parents lost and they sort of become the handmaids to their parents' grief. Siblings also lose so much."

 

But this is not to say that Name All the Animals, which takes its name from a biblical reference, is all pain all the time. Far from it. Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls is rife with comic foibles and misadventures involving snogging behind Our Lady of the Broken Toes, discovering the sisters' secret pool, and falling asleep with a girlfriend in the dean of discipline's bed. The nuns are depicted in all their multi-dimensional glory wavering among hilarity, fathoms-deep sympathy, and hellfire and brimstone homophobia. But they work collectively to gently and sometimes not so gently nudge her back into the world, particularly Smith's favorite, the unconventional Sister Agnes. Sister Aggie dubs Smith "Blondie" and literally drags her from her work, the Convent switchboard Smith operated as a work study student, to rouse her from melancholia. When Smith hesitates to leave her post, "Sister Aggie stopped, spun around, and stared at [her]. She leaned forward, hunched over her spindly cane, and motioned for [Smith] to bend over toward her. 'Fuck the phone, Blondie,'" Aggie tells her.

 

Smith told BTW her loving portrayal of the sisters was in response to all the bad press they usually get. "You always here about nuns being extremely strict disciplinarians, harsh, and into corporal punishment," said Smith, who was puzzled by this. "I've met many nuns in my life and I've never met a dud," she said, with a laugh. "They devote their lives to what are often politically radical ideas, such as the social and economic issues they address with their work with the poor, despite the fact that they're part of the Catholic Church, which is ... conservative."

 

Many memoirs that deal with grief -- Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, Barbara Lazear Ascher's Landscape Without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief, Genevieve Jurgensen's The Disappearance -- typically maintain their somber tone throughout, but Name All the Animals presents a balanced, fully wrought representation of the life of a fiercely imaginative girl, who happens to fall in love with another girl. "I see it as a love story," Smith told BTW. "I was madly in love with Teresa Dinovelli, and I was lucky because the first person I kissed, and everything, was somebody who was my peer, who I felt so emotionally and intellectually connected to. It was true love, and when fumbling around in the dark in high school, it's rare to get that."

 

As much as readers might want to know what happens in the next chapter of Smith's life, she reported that she currently doesn't have plans for a sequel. She does, however, have plans for fiction, which she sees as a liberating genre. "I love that you get to make everything up," she said. And she doesn't necessarily like to know where she's going ahead of time. "Getting lost is a big part of my writing process -- you've just got to follow the voices, the characters wherever they take you," she explained. "You've got to trust them, no matter how many times they may lead you astray. You go down a lot of dead ends before you find the road that takes you to your narrative structure. And that's okay, because all those wrong turns are useful -- they give you a greater intimacy with your subject. I'm writing a novel now and I'm having fun getting lost." --Karen Schechner

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The Miami Herald - February 29, 2004 Sunday

SECTION: M; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 679 words

HEADLINE: One child lost and one child found; A teen grows up as she battles with despair in this spellbinding memoir.; MEMOIR

BYLINE: BY ELSBETH LINDNER

BODY:

NAME ALL THE ANIMALS.

Alison Smith. Scribner. 319 pages. $24.

 

Alison Smith's beloved older brother Roy died in a car accident when she was 15. Her mother had been in the habit of calling both children Alroy, so close were they, a club of two. Now Alison was alone, bearing not only her own grief but her parents' fear and dashed hopes. To her father, she became ''all I have left.'' At school she turned into an untouchable, ''the-girl-whose-brother-died. '' Smith's struggles to reconcile her devastated self with her family and the world are the subject of this delicate, mournful, unblinking memoir.

 

Shielded from the graphic details of the car crash, she spent the next 18 months patching together something resembling the quiet life of a Catholic teenager in Rochester, N.Y. After her parents' paroxysms of grief and the neighborhood's efforts at commiseration, Smith returned to her convent school, where the nuns were watchful and kind. Slowly a sort of numb continuity settled, and her father resumed his early morning ritual of blessing his child with a relic, naming her parts -- ''Bless her mind. Bless her throat. Bless her hands.' ' -- in the same way that Adam had named all the animals, to keep track of them. Nevertheless, absurdities and awful reminders of the family's loss intruded, such as the encyclopedias ordered for Roy which continued to arrive with unstoppable regularity, like unbidden memories.

 

Smith's loss was adult in scale yet in other respects she was still a child, anxious for her classmates' approval. One particular friendship, with a girl named Terry, sustained her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship became sexual, adding the electricity of first love to Alison's emotional tangle. When the liaison became known to the nuns, they even excused this transgression, but her mother's denunciation -- ''lesbians go to hell'' -- pushed her over the edge. Alison finally chose to read the newspaper article supplying the details of Roy's tortured last moments. That searing knowledge exposed as a lie her father's often-repeated assurance that God would give her anything she wanted, and Alison's most fundamental underpinnings -- her parents and her belief -- were knocked away.

 

Her crisis deepened. She became anorexic; she dealt a crushing blow to her mother by declaring her lost faith; and on the third anniversary of Roy's death she flirted with death at the exact same spot, where the guardrail was still broken. But there would be no symmetrical accident or dramatic resolution. Instead, she eventually discovered the capacity to reconnect with what she and Roy had shared in life and reached a different, sad, but finally tolerable place.

 

As rites of passage go, Smith's was violent and punishing, yet it is described with cool clarity by a writer of formidable control. Mawkishness, knee-jerk emotions, self-indulgence of any sort are scrupulously avoided in her narrative, which searches for truth and meaning where, her young self began to realize, there might be none.

 

A number of the book's more numinous scenes take place at night, as she roamed childhood haunts she had shared with Roy, feeding the stray dog he had befriended, attempting to reconnect with his spirit. Her lucid prose is especially effective at evoking these twilight communions, efforts to penetrate the anguish of irreversible separation while breaking out from the suffocation of the family home. Such simplicity of metaphor, combined with lambent depictions of childhood, are characteristic of Smith's gift. Her rapt focus casts an undeniable spell.

 

Name All the Animalsis an aching testimony to girlhood interrupted. It is also the understated literary expression of a detached, probing intelligence capable of discerning beauty, profundity, occasionally even comedy in the details of a life redefined by tragedy. Although an account of piercing pain, of voyaging into dark places alone, this memoir speaks in a soft voice. It is a survivor's story written by the girl next door.

 

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

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