With achingly beautiful prose, Jody Hobbs Hesler explores mental illness and the devastating effects of suicide on family members left behind in her novel Without You Here (Flexible Press: 2024). Complicated family dynamics and a troubled marriage are also important themes that make this story set in the Virginia mountains unforgettable.
The timeline shifts frequently as the tale travels back and forth to show what led to Nonie’s suicide and how it affected her sister and her niece. Some chapters offer glimpses into Nonie’s childhood, revealing signs of the mental illness that will trouble her all her life:
“She calls the feeling “the shivers” because they make her feel cold deep inside. They start in her toes, then creep upward and erase one piece of her at a time. And emptiness that fills her up, from her toes to her shins, her rib cage, the heart beating inside, until none of it belongs to her anymore.”
Her mother’s answer to the child’s sometimes unusual behavior is to insist she go outside to play. And her “father off-gassed shame of having her for a daughter.” Everything is wrong with her. Her hair—wild. The clothes she wears—different. The imaginary games she plays—weird. Nonie doesn’t fit in. Medications help, but they make her feel strange and she doesn’t take them regularly. She has trouble holding onto a job. Trouble forming meaningful relationships. The one person she is close to is her namesake, her niece Noreen. Noreen has the same wild hair, the same trouble fitting in, and sometimes similar “shivers”—though Noreen is careful to hide them from the world.
While twenty-seven-year-old Nonie is supervising her niece as she plays on a tire swing, Noreen falls off and breaks her arm. The accident—which Nonie blames herself for—sends Nonie into a tailspin. Already unstable and off her meds, she dies by suicide.
With anxiety, Ruth watches her daughter Noreen constantly for signs that her child might share more than unruly curls with Nonie. In earlier generations, other family members also died by suicide. Will her daughter inherit Nonie’s mental illness? Ruth makes Noreen promise if things get scary and awful, she will always remember she is “strong enough to make the next day better.”
Years later, Noreen is still trying to understand why her beloved aunt hung herself: Was there “Something that drowned out everything around her? So she couldn’t even think of how much it would hurt us to lose her?” Of all her family, Noreen was closest to her aunt:
“As it is, Noreen’s Nonie never has to exist as anything but that magical, whimsical person who loved her best in the world. Even if she also hurt her the most. The space she’d filled had been so vast, Noreen’s never managed to fill it back up.”
She thinks about how “joy rides on the back of sorrow. You have to feel both to feel either.”
The author does a masterful job setting up a contrast between Noreen’s only childhood friend, Claudia, and her adult friend, Lizbeth. Despite Claudia’s cruelty, Noreen believes she is different from the other kids—loveable—and puts up with whatever Claudia dishes out. Lizbeth, however, shows Noreen kindness. Unlike her aunt, Noreen is capable of forming strong relationships.
Yet Noreen’s relationship with her husband George is troubling. In some ways, they are alike, both on the outside looking in, never quite belonging. But George is needy and selfish, isolating her out in the countryside without a car. Most of the time, Noreen takes “what she can get in place of what she wants” in her marriage. She adores her daughter Evie and is such a wonderful, playful mother, that readers will realize Noreen is going to turn out okay. She is not her aunt. Still, entertaining a toddler is not enough to fulfill an intelligent woman’s life day in and day out. She needs adult company:
“The balance of the time, though, it’s just Noreen and Evie and the rolling hills, the wide sky, the lonely trees, while George gets the car, his life and work beyond the, plus the hours of solitude his commute provides.”
Noreen is stronger than she thinks, and the novel’s surprise ending leaves hope that she will find a way to grab what she needs from life.
Hesler’s writing is pitch perfect and imaginative, which especially sparkles in Noreen’s inner thoughts:
“Outside, the real sunshine shifts patches of tree shadows around the yard, and it occurs to Noreen for the first time how heavy shadows must be. How hard to move around. How tired the sun must get from all that work.”
Those are lines to savor. To send you outside to commune with the sun, the trees, the sky. To explore the oft overlooked shadows.
For its insights into mental health and complex family dynamics, Without You Here is a story to treasure.
Jody Hobbs Hesler
Jody Hobbs Hesler grew up between suburban Richmond, Virginia, and the mountains outside Winchester, Virginia. Experiences of both regions flavor her writing. Her fiction, nonfiction and journalism has been featured in many publications and literary magazines. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia and writes for The Los Angeles Review.
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