An Exploration of Grief and Possibility in Heather Frese’s “The Saddest Girl on the Beach” https://ift.tt/Tv7zYS0
Heather Frese’s freshman novel, The Baddest Girl on the Planet, was but a mere introduction to the depths this writer has to offer. In her sophomore and most current release, The Saddest Girl on the Beach, Frese takes us into depths of love, loss, and grief that can only come from first-hand knowledge.
Nineteen-year-old Charlotte McConnell is newly bereaved after the stunning loss of her father to cancer. She can’t force herself to stay at home in Ohio with her mom and younger brother, nor can she bring herself to return to college, despite her father’s last wish for her: “After I’m gone, say a prayer, send one up, and it’s over. It’s okay. It’s important to focus on your studies.” Instead, following a panicked call from her best friend, Evie, Charlotte finds herself on the island of Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where she and her whole family vacationed for many years. Evie’s family owns the Pamlico Inn, a charming hotel along the shores of the Outer Banks, and this setting becomes the perfect backdrop to the emotional turmoil that ebbs and flows within Charlotte. Her grief, like a crashing wave in a storm, is cyclical and unpredictable. Likewise, Evie is experiencing her own ups and downs while managing an unplanned pregnancy and, subsequently, marrying the aloof man who fathered her child. As the two women navigate personal dilemmas, their longstanding friendship is also put to the test. In addition to the self-harm Charlotte is secretly inflicting – the “bite of physical pain” that distracts her from grief – she is also in a love triangle with Nate, Evie’s brother, and Michael, Evie’s cousin’s boyfriend. Through all the chaos of internal emotions and external events, the one thing that stays constant throughout is the idyllic background of the Pamlico Sound.
The Saddest Girl on the Beach is rich with metaphors, some natural to the story and some molded to fit the script. For instance, one storm after another crashes into the island during Charlotte’s stay there – Nor’easters, Hurricane Isabel, Hurricane Earl, to name a few. These storms are a natural expression of the internal volatility happening within Charlotte due to her grief. These storms don’t just reflect Charlotte’s emotions alone, however. Frese writes, “…the wind began — subtle at first, brushing my arms as I walked from my car to his door, then sidling against his trailer as I pressed my body into his. Wind, rising and wailing and rocking us side to side through the night. What would happen if I didn’t have him to cling to, if it was just me, alone in the night in the wind?” Here, Frese uses the environment to reflect the emotional struggle between Charlotte and Michael. The restrained beginning and the following intensity is a beautifully crafted design on the writer’s part. Similarly, Charlotte finds a book titled How to Read a North Carolina Beach, which becomes a standing metaphor between Charlotte and Michael, connecting them to each other and to their environment. The phrases they select from the book and text to each other act as an elucidation not only of their budding connection, but also a way to describe the ocean, beach, flora, and fauna. In this book, Charlotte finds the perfect metaphor to explain her grief: “The swash zone is the area on the beach where this thin, relatively smooth, shallow layer of water constantly moves back and forth… I’m the swash zone… A shallow layer of grief constantly moving back and forth.”
Setting the characters aside, Frese has a way of writing about the land and the emotions it elicits that can only come from someone who’s literally been there, done that. She writes of the island, “Winters on Cape Hatteras were more desolate and more compelling than I’d imagined. There was a quietness, a muted rhythm that made summer seem like a carnival of color and life… The island, extended and curved like a ballerina’s arm, elegantly jutted people away in these windy, chilly months.” The intimacy and detail scribed in every scene and in every sentence portray a breathtaking landscape that readers understand to be a balm to a weary soul. Perhaps it was this exact place where, like Charlotte, Frese worked through her own grief, where she spent her time “writing her way out of a haze of grief,” as she stated in the Acknowledgements. It takes first-person experience like that to write lines such as this: “No one told me that I might travel through my grief and come back to myself, but that I wouldn’t be the same. That there would always be a dividing line from who I am now and who I used to be. Who I was before.”
Despite the tangible descriptions of both land and loss, there was one plotline that left me unsatisfied. In the book, Evie marries Stephen, the father of her baby, and throughout the entire novel, he’s more or less missing, gone off somewhere. He’s dishonest about looking for work, and he skips doctor’s appointments, yet Evie insists on being loyal to him and making it work. Perhaps this is all a lead-up to a third novel, The Bitterest Girl at the Office, or something similar to join the ranks of Frese’s wonderfully women-centered novels.
All in all, the theme of The Saddest Girl on the Beach could be summed up as an exploration of life and death. The pregnancy, the loss, the love, the loss, the storms and their destruction, and the renewal that comes thereafter are all distilled in this lovely book that isn’t necessarily joyful but certainly hopeful. Frese writes, “I saw the golden sea oats waving on the dunes, the bright sweep of kiteboarders skimming across the waters of the sound, my car traveling up the thin line of Hatteras Island, this impossible island, this narrow, resilient strip of sand, full of impossible life, holding against the fathoms of the deep, blue sea.” If those lines don’t draw you into the realm of possibility, I don’t know what will.
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