Love in the Archives by Eileen Vorbach Collins
Apprentice House Press, 2023
In Love in the Archives—an unforgettable collection of essays about living in the aftermath of a child’s death by suicide at age fifteen—author Eileen Vorbach Collins honors the memory of her daughter at the same time that she stakes a claim for the right, the need, the imperative of the bereaved to grieve long beyond the time at which society insists they overcome a tragic loss. Because there is no overcoming a love and a loss that are infinite. And there’s no point at which it won’t be both a burden and a blessing for this mother to live with the memory of her daughter, Lydia; reckon with her absence; and imagine again and again the woman she might have become.
Lydia was no ordinary teen, and Collins so vividly conjures her, even embodies her, that the reader comes to truly see this wildly creative girl who could “make the best purple,” who “liked orange Tic-Tacs and herbal tea, Marilyn Manson and Mozart,” who gathered bones from roadkill and collected—and read—comic books, Bibles, the Book of Mormon, and the Quran. A girl who “suffered the burden of perspicacity.”
Collins is a masterful writer, but her craft doesn’t draw attention to itself. Her greatest talent seems to be a kind of sleight of hand. She writes about the quotidian, and before you realize where she’s leading you, you arrive at a universal truth or a moment of devastating clarity. She describes, for example, the practice of growing and reproducing orchids—an account that takes a sharp final turn. “I’m learning to propagate them, to wait till the keiki is strong enough to leave the mother plant, before I cut it loose,” she writes. “I wait to be sure the mother plant is strong enough to withstand the loss.”
Collins’s prose aches, bleeds, trembles, and howls. But while these essays are grief-soaked, they’re equally infused with love, gratitude, humor, and irreverence. She demonstrates the truth of an epigraph by James O’Barr: “Life is lousy with hurt but it also shimmers with beauty.” In these essays, joy and pain curl around each other like strands of DNA—a helix of suffering and blessings that sustains Collins as she learns to live without her daughter.
Love in the Archives is a reminder of how malleable the human heart is, how much it can collapse, stretch, crack open, and then knit itself back together. It’s a tender, indelible meditation on “how exquisitely painful it is to love someone so deeply.”
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B.K. Jackson is a writer, editor, book coach, and founder of Severance.com, a magazine and community for adoptees and people who’ve experienced DNA surprises. She’s written for publications including the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, The Sun, and WIRED. She’s developing an anthology and is writing a memoir about family secrets.