REVIEW: "Truths I Never Told You" by Kelly Rimmer
Childhood memories are... weird.
It's perplexing, how the brain decides what to store from these formative youthful years.
I often find myself questioning the validity of my own childhood recollections, mainly because they are so... random.
In thinking back on my own youth what I remember most are not the important things — not the hours I surely spent snuggled in my mother's arms or the wonderful times we undoubtedly shared but — instead the minutia.
Specifically, I most vividly remember a sweater featuring a squirrel with 3D acorns that I wore often — presumably because my mother loved it — and pretty much all of the words to the Quantum Leap intro.
But, like, why?
Why did my brain decide to catalog these pieces of useless information carefully enough that I can retrieve them but not other, more significant, things?
It's true that, as a now 37 year old, I don't spend too much time thinking about my childhood memories. Because whatever happened back then — whatever shaped me — it got me here. And I'm happy with where I am, so I guess the rest doesn't matter.
But I can't help but wonder if I would care more about what happened in my past if I wasn't happy with my present.
And that's the situation in which Beth, one of the central characters in Kelly Rimmers’ Truths I Never Told You finds herself in at the opening of this novel.
A new mother to a child for whom she subjected herself to infertility treatments, Beth should be happier than she's ever been. But, like too many new mothers, she isn't.
Instead, she finds herself struggling with what decades ago would have been minimized as the “baby blues” but what we now know is a serious, debilitating, medical condition, postpartum depression.
As it would turn out, Beth isn't the first female in her lineage to suffer from postpartum depression. In fact, her own mother — a woman of whom she has few memories, having lost her when Beth was young — also struggled profoundly at the hands of this frustrating psychological condition.
Beth doesn’t know this, though. Nor do her three siblings, all of whom missed their mother following her death in a car accident, but felt lucky to be raised by such a strong, competent father.
Now, though, their time with their father — the only parent they have ever really known — is drawing to a close. Not only is he in the throws of heart failure, but also his mental condition is rapidly deteriorating, leaving him unable to care for himself.
Though Beth has enough on her plate, she is desperate for anything to distract her from the dissatisfaction she feels in her role as a mother. So, when their father relocates to a nursing facility, she latches on to an opportunity to busy herself and volunteers to tackle the daunting task of cleaning out their childhood home.
It isn’t long into the project that Beth realizes she’s in for more than just sifting through abandoned memorabilia and decades outdated clothes.
Several days into the task, she finds that the attic, a cavernous space that her father had always kept tidy, isn’t as she’d remembered it. Not only has her father, in his unnoticed descent into dementia, left the space almost impassably messy, he’s also accidentally abandoned some things she’s never seen. In fact, they are things that her father never wanted her to see.
Scattered around the attic, she finds notes from her mother. After reading them, she’s left with more questions than answers as the messages written on these tattered bits of yellowed paper strongly suggest everything she and her siblings believed to be true about their mother, in fact, isn’t.
Given my affinity for Kelly Rimmer’s last novel, The Things You Cannot Say, I had unnervingly high expectations for this book.
And they were exceeded.
This novel is utterly breathtaking.
It has heart.
It has depth.
It has purpose.
Though I wanted to read this slowly, savoring every last word, I literally could not put it down.
For an entire day I eked out extra reading time, setting aside tasks that I otherwise would have completed because I felt like my world simply could not continue spinning until I had finished this novel.
And, honestly, how often can you say that?
Among the many strengths of this novel, one thing that I found particularly impressive was Rimmer’s ability to maintain control over a huge cast of characters.
I have to admit I was a bit worried at the start of this novel when Rimmer kept introducing members of this sprawling family: The four children, their spouses, their children.
As a general rule the more compact the collection of characters the more effectively an author can manage them. Build them. Give them all distinct personalities.
It's a lesson I taught my middle school writing students for years, dissuading them from putting everyone and their mother into their stories.
But, in this case, Rimmer managed to build all of these characters, shaping them into round, robust, real people.
And, what's even more impressive, all of this character building never felt tedious or monotonous.
It felt natural and organic and real.
It felt like I had met these people in real life and was growing gradually better acquainted with them, digging through the layers of their lives until they were dear friends.
And because I grew to care about — shit, love, even — these characters so dearly I was utterly heartbroken again and again and again as I watched them move through times difficult enough to break most people.
Much like Rimmer’s previous novel, The Things You Cannot Say, this novel felt heartbreakingly important.
Though dealing with a very different injustice than in her previous work, Rimmer was just as effective in highlighting an atrocity and, while somehow avoiding slipping into preachiness, making her readers see the mistakes of the past that we must never repeat.
This book doesn’t just deserve a place on your to be read list, it deserves to jump straight to the top of it.
It is not overstating it to call this novel stunningly brilliant.
It deserves all the cocktails in the world - even though our scale stops at 5 out of 5 cocktails.
Historical fiction isn’t always my favorite genre, but lately I’ve been having a lot of luck with historical fiction reads — specifically, this novel, The Nightingale, and The Giver of Stars. What are your favorite historical fiction reads? Tell me about them in the comments, below.
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