Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family by Sarah Beth Childers (review)

Shake Terribly the Earth, an essay collection by West Virginian Sarah Beth Childers, captures essentials of the memoir genre and the central Appalachian multi-generational familial experience.

Her prose shines in essays like “Ghost Siblings,” which centers on the fascinating subject matter of how the author’s family, and her mother in particular, cope with the loss of a child from an ectopic pregnancy. Her mother imagines this child (“‘It’s a boy,” she breathed… ‘God told me his name is Christopher Michael and, my darling Sarah Beth, he looks a lot like you’”) at various stages of the author’s childhood, on road trips, and at school. One of the rich moments of epiphany in the piece comes when the author recounts her concerns about what will happen when her mother meets Christopher Michael in heaven:

“I’m afraid my mom will get to heaven and look for Christopher Michael, and he’ll be a girl.” My friend laughed. He’s a man of faith, but not the kind to have a divine revelation on the way to the mailbox. “I think if your mother makes it that far—makes it to Heaven and finds her child—you don’t have anything to worry about.”

… I believe my mother’s going to Heaven, and I believe in my mother, even if the two beliefs sometimes amount to the same thing. I’m not worried about my mother’s faith. I worry my mother won’t find the person she’s expecting, and I fear the revelation will cause her pain.

A clear hallmark of memoir is allowing the reader to experience the author’s moments of realization with her as it happens, but it requires a brave writer to share something so raw and unfiltered, and Childers does so without pause. She also excels at dialogue that illuminates her family story, as in “My Dead-Grandmother Essay.” Treading through family lore, one’s own memories, and those memories retold by kin is a daunting cacophony of perspectives to try to distill into artful writing. Childers does this with varying success in this collection. Small details such as alternating from third person—referring to her parents and grandmother by first names when recounting their relationships with each other—to first person when addressing her own memories or relationships (a storytelling device present throughout the collection) is at times distracting and distances the reader from the story. But by the end, well-crafted scenes, balanced with dialogue and appropriate amount of descriptive detail, smooth over most of the sharp edges.

For example, in the final scene of “My Dead-Grandmother Essay” the narrator describes an intimate moment with her grandmother that is rich in sensory detail and immerses the reader in the moment: “On granny’s rare visits to our house, she smoked outside on the concrete steps that led from the driveway to our back door. When I was four, I sat next to her, my cheek against the polyester blouse, watching the pale gray smoke and the blue-tailed lizards that darted in and out of the cracks between the steps and the brick foundation…Later, alone, I pretended to smoke, puffing on twigs, raking my dull pink nails across my unmarked tongue.” The sensations of touch, sight, and taste elicited in this passage eliminate any distance between narrator and reader, leaving the reader with an all-encompassing feeling of being part of the scene instead of just a witness to it.

The majority of the essays in Shake Terribly the Earth show the best of what family memoir can be—the musings, the imaginings, the new perspective on past experiences. Her storytelling skill is also clear in “Scissors,” where three generations of women cope with their mother’s expectations for femininity, religious tradition, and hairstyles. This essay is a collection of many small stories and observations on an object, containing...