A Review of Mary South's You Will Never Be Forgotten

When a mother loses her nine-year-old daughter, she discovers a way to circumvent grief. She plans a "rebirth," a subsequent child, a duplicate for the daughter she'd lost. "If our baby was returning to us, there was nothing to grieve," she explains. The mother painstakingly reenacts her first daughter's life with her genetic copy. A first kiss, the death of a pet, and birthday parties are all scripted and choreographed to occur as they had before. Through control of this duplicate daughter, the mother tries to resurrect the child she lost.

Grief is a feral thing in Mary South's stunning debut story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten. The wounded mother in South's "Not Setsuko," is one of many characters who look for a balm for uncontrollable feelings—grief, rage, desperation. Across ten stories, South inhabits people grasping to stay tethered to their ghosts. Loss and trauma are not easily bandaged. Wounds stay open, leave caverns to fill and fill.

Trauma infantilizes a group of men, leaves them groveling for taboo maternal intimacy while they bicker and fight, propping up each other's sadness at a hostel on the Turkish coast.

A celebrated architect from a fractured family superimposes her daughter's birth defects onto designs for buildings, plans that twist and distort the human form.

Loss compounds as a relator for the houses of the recently deceased mourns his wife. "A memory is altered each time it is recollected," South's protagonist claims. "Whenever I long for my wife I lose her more and more." In his grief he recognizes the totality of his haunting. "What can be more ghostly than missing someone so intensely that you can no longer remember her as she was?"

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I've read a lot about grief. I look for characters like South's characters, people who struggle to bend their worlds into shape after trauma and loss, who clutch totems of memory for people who are gone.

I used to read about grief to try to recognize myself, make sense of the ways I'd tried to hold onto my mother after I lost her suddenly. Then, I read books written like manuals, ways to measure progress in Kübler-Ross stages, daily meditations that trained focus forward to the next day, then the next, then the next.

But nothing about my life felt linear. I clung to a voicemail from my mother, thirty-three seconds of her voice I'd saved on my phone.

I almost lost it once. Months after she died, I fell into a river. My phone was in my pocket.

I remember standing in a Verizon store—still soaking wet—while a man in a polo shirt told me to enter my name into a tablet.

"Someone will take care of you," he said, looking away from where I dripped on the gray carpet.

When an employee called my name, I thrust my phone forward, clutched its dark husk.

"My phone died," I said. Then, near tears, "is my voicemail gone?"

I looked at my thumb, still pressing the round power button, red flaring beneath my nail.

I did a lot that surprised me after I lost my mother, acts more irrational than standing in a puddle in a Verizon Store. I still wonder about this person, who I'd become after trauma and loss.

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"If you're reading this page, chances are you've recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry." Through a hospital website's frequently asked questions page, South inhabits the voice of a neurosurgeon addressing patient concerns. Though the document, ostensibly, aims to placate fears, South's surgeon offers direct—often lyrical, often wryly funny—descriptions of what appears within our skulls. "The blush of living brain has been described as resembling the inside of a conch shell or a crumbling marble quarry. To me, it's like the revelation...