While playing alone in her backyard one afternoon, seven-year-old Celia suddenly disappears while her father Christopher is inside giving a tour of their historic house and her mother Janet is at an orchestra rehearsal.
Utterly shattered, Christopher, a writer of fantasy and science fiction, withdraws from everyone around him, especially his wife, losing himself in his writing by conjuring up worlds where Celia still exists—as a child, as a teenager, as a young single mother—and revealing in his stories not only his own point of view but also those of Janet, the policeman in charge of the case, and the townspeople affected by the tragedy, ultimately culminating in a portrait of a small town changed forever. The Truth About Celia is a profound meditation on grief and loss and how we carry on in its aftermath.
Turning Inward: A Conversation with Kevin Brockmeier (Mary McMyne for Del Sol Literary Dialogues)
Would you discuss why you chose to tell the point of view that you did for The Truth About Celia, as well as why you are fond of toying with point of view, in general?
In the case of The Truth About Celia, the point of view experiments in the book do exactly the opposite: they highlight the nature of the stories as fiction. But they also serve notice that you are meant to look underneath the stories to see what else is going on, to peer behind the curtain and ask why they were written and how they affect the ostensible author, Christopher Brooks, who has been both devastated and in some way introduced to himself by the loss of his daughter. My initial conceit was that I would present the book as a simple story collection and allow the readers to gradually discover on their own that the entire enterprise was an expression of love and grief on the part of the author, an attempt to explore what might have happened to his daughter and to map his own mind, but my editor convinced me that I should orient the readers with an author's note. She also convinced me to change the title from The Celia Stories by Christopher Brooks to The Truth About Celia. Some of the stories are meant to be understood as biography or autobiography, some of them as efforts at speculation or even fantasy, and some of them as a combination of the two.
Reviews
“Emotional, heartbreaking and beautifully styled.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Affecting. . . . A dazzling fantasia on grief and time.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Lyrical, magical, achingly bittersweet. . . . The mesmerizing whisper of Brockmeier’s prose [turns] skeptical readers into believers. The gentle, rolling pulse of these sentences make elegiac epiphanies out of Christopher’s grief-borne stream-of-consciousness. . . . For evoking this bleak estate with unflinching accuracy and honesty, Kevin Brockmeier deserves our praise.”
—Newsday
“Outstanding. . . . Eloquently describes the pain of losing a child and the search for meaning in resistant fact and more resilient imagination. I highly recommend this book.”
—John Hammond, The San Antonio Express-News
“Devastating and dazzling; in its painful fusion of pathos, fantasy and—ultimately—realism, Brockmeier’s heartbreaking book is reminiscent of The Lovely Bones.”
—Time Out
“Each sentence is an elegy–a celebration of every heartbreaking detail that makes life beautiful and an exacting portrait of the bone-aching, irredeemable despair of loss. Every scene is a heart that throbs with both glorious, garrulous joy and profound, insurmountable sorrow. Like all of Kevin’s work, this book is exquisitely crafted and deeply evocative, and as a reader I am once again awed and moved to both desperation and delight.”
—Thisbe Nissen, author of The Good People of New York
“A compelling and intricate study of loss and acceptance.”
—The Baltimore Sun
The gorgeous language and wealth of detail . . . elicit[s] from readers overwhelming feelings that lead to a catharsis."
—The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)
“Together, the eight stories, ranging from psychological realism to science fiction to supernatural fantasy, fall somewhere between a linked collection and a full-fledged novel, and their unvarying gracefulness takes some of the bite out of the sadness—perhaps to much. They go down more easily than, given the subject, they ought to.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A startlingly imaginative and empathetic work.”
—The Miami Herald
”Imagine I’m standing beside you in the bookstore. I’m putting this book in your hands. I loved The Truth About Celia: you should buy this book, take it home, and read it at once.”
—Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen
“Wrenching . . . You may never read a more beautifully written novel than this one.”
—The Arkansas Times
“Fierce and tightly imagined. . . . The Truth About Celia has all the austere ache of a cello suite. . . . [Brockmeier] proves himself a master of compassionate reach.”
—The Boston Globe
“Brilliant. . . . beautifully written and relentlessly gripping. . . . The psychological devastation suffered by Janet and Christopher . . . is made excruciatingly tangible in [this] remarkable novel.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Some of the most moving writing in the English language. . . . The pleasure of Brockmeier’s novel–and it is a deep pleasure indeed–comes from an excruciatingly poignant exploration of the effect of Brooks’ loss. . . . Fellow writers can only envy Brockmeier’s felicity with prose, his lyricism that aspires to great music. The Truth About Celia is modest in size but not in scope, and the magnificent prose lingers in memory long after the book is closed.”
—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette