Once, just once, I'd like to get through a Kris Radish book without crying.
Gravel on the Side of the Road: True Stories From a Broad Who Has Been There was not that book. That's OK. Well, mostly.
Reviewing a book when you know the author — Radish and her partner own Wine Madonna in downtown St. Pete — makes for tough criticism. On one hand, I liked the book, although it's a departure like you would not believe from Radish's typical milieu of post– and peri-menopausal women looking to forge bonds of sisterhood as they march ever onwards.
As much as I enjoy reading a well-crafted Radish story, I enjoyed, too, the narrative essays patchworked together into Gravel. On the other hand, this book marks a dramatic change in publishing for Radish, and it shows. Bantam published the last Radish book I read, An Elegant Gathering of White Snows, but for Gravel, Radish chose to go with BookSparks, a boutique publisher.
As one who gets edited — and one who desperately needs editing — I can say, without reservation, any issues I found with this book have to do with BookSparks' editing process and not Radish. No writer is perfect, and Radish s no exception. Writers need editors. BookSparks lists editing as one of their services, but in times I found the pacing and timeline of Gravel confusing. Either BookSparks doesn't have editors on par with Radish's former publishers or she chose not to use them.
That said, that didn't stop me from devouring the book. As a journalist, the four-page insights into how she "got" each story fascinated me.
Radish's empathy for people and how they intertwined their stories with hers struck a chord as well. Radish is a people person, and that's what went into her stories. It's also what comes through in her retelling of how she crafted her stories. The reader gets the sense that these vignettes of her life have poked through the surface of her writing because she had no other choice.
Years ago I watched a movie about a woman who could heal the sick, except every time she did, she took on some of their illness as it left their bodies. That's how it feels to read Radish's narrative: Every time she wrote a story, she absorbed some of the sadness or terror or joy or anger, and it stayed with her long after she'd put the printed story to bed.
The book has personal essays as well, although to this reader the stories writing other people's stories spoke the loudest in this work. Yes, at times, it feels as though I've arrived in the middle of the story, or that I don't know everything I should, but, as she does in her fiction (and in many ways, better), Radish makes me feel what she wants me to feel. By comparison, anything else is trivial.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.