“A History of Heartache” by Patrick Strickland

The first story in A History of Heartache, Patrick Strickland’s debut short story collection, gives away the title when we learn an alcoholic mother “has a history of heartache, most of which she drums up all on her own nowadays.” The question that arises again and again in these loosely-interconnected stories is this: Is heartache a haunting, or is it a conjuring? Is heartache purely born of what happens to us, or is it something we resurrect over and over with our choices and our apparent inability to resist our own worst impulses?

There is no shortage of heartache in these stories, which follow the lives of characters in and from North Texas. There is drug addiction, alcoholism, child abuse, suicide, domestic violence, animal abuse, and violence between and among children. There is pervasive poverty enrobing these small towns. There are deaths and leavings and losses upon losses.

These losses keep themselves alive in the form of ghost-memories of a wife lost to cancer, a brother lost to an overdose, and a friend lost to suicide. These ghosts show up, monitoring that which was left behind, clearing their throats and whispering in the ears of the living. Sometimes the ghost is a tether to old love, and sometimes the ghost is a reminder of the thing the character is trying to avoid—and avoidance, in the form of pills and bottles and casual violence, is a continuous practice for these survivors.

These aren’t the only hauntings, either. We learn in the first story that “it doesn’t matter where you are in this town; the glow from the football stadium burns the night sky purple.” The juxtaposition of football and religion hangs over the stories, embodied by Coach Tarp, who shows up in several stories as both the football coach and the youth minister of Athletes for Christ—although as one teenager notes, “I don’t know what kind of training you have to undergo to call yourself a minister, but whatever it is, I don’t imagine he’s done it.” In the towns of these stories, football, religion, and politics morph into a single inseparable entity.

Patrick Strickland’s prior work as a journalist covering far-right groups and militias certainly informs the depiction of this inseparable entity, as Confederate flags wave in the background and “General Holy War” beats the drums of grievance politics on a trailer park television, and children play war games that are not really games. But these stories are stories—they are not tidy political explanations, and the characters often defy categorization. While Strickland gives us a lens into the characters’ inner worlds, he does not insist on any particularly rigid interpretation of them.

The crass logic of dominance, though, is unequivocal, and repeated over and over again in these stories when a dominated person finds someone else to dominate: An abused child tortures cats or insects, or an abused woman harms a vulnerable stranger. There is a sense that these characters, out of their trauma, are locked into a vicious cycle of traumatizing others—and, in the process, re-traumatizing themselves. Throughout the stories, there is a question of control—whom we can and can’t control, and whether a person, in the wake of trauma, has the power to control even themselves.

But within the shadows of these cycles materializing and repeating themselves, there are also nudgings toward something different woven through the book. The ghost-wife reminds her husband of “morsels of relief” and inclines him toward tenderness. There is a sermon about compassion. There are moments of connection and inklings of solidarity when the characters remember that life is “a tough place to live right now.” Characters catch flashes of light, even as they are haunted by heartache—and around the margins of this traumatized world, there are moments of mercy and even glimpses of hope.

Patrick Strickland

Patrick Strickland is a journalist and fiction writer from Texas. He’s the author of several nonfiction books, including You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, and Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle.