“Out of the Dark”
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By Marian Elliott; Cirque Press, 2024; 303 pages; $15.
A woman suffers the loss of her 19-year-old son and falls into a near-paralyzing depression. Her husband leaves their home in Long Island, New York, and moves to Florida, forbidding her to accompany him. He insists that she wants to visit relatives teaching in Toksook Bay, Alaska, and buys a camper for the trip. Accompanied by her son’s elderly shepherd-collie mix, she sets out on a road trip, unsure of where or how far she might go and really wanting only to join her husband in Florida.
This is the disquieting start to a story labeled memoir, told by Wasilla resident Marian Elliott. Memoirs generally employ an “I” to tell a true story, but “Out of the Dark” features a main character named Jeanne, an apparent stand-in for the author. (To avoid confusion, the book might have been called an autobiographical novel, based on the writer’s life but with the freedom to change identities and employ details and conversations to meet the story’s demands. There are other distinctions between memoirs and fiction, but the author must have had her reasons for choosing a third-person perspective.)
In any case, Elliott has told a compelling story with several angles. The first third of the book centers on the tragedy of losing a child to a senseless accident, the family’s inability to talk of the young man or his death, and the failing marriage. (As Jeanne learns when she finally attends a grief support group, a majority of marriages falter after such a tragedy.) Jeanne suffers emotional and mental anguish, worsened by her husband blaming her, without reason, for the death and otherwise undermining her sense of reality. He proves to be a champion of gaslighting and manipulation: “Do you have any idea how lucky you are? I know people who would give anything to go to Alaska. I wish I were going.”
Much of the remaining book is essentially a road trip, as Jeanne and the dog Gulliver, to whom she is devoted, travel together. Beginning in September, they first tour through a region she actually wants to visit — Canada’s Maritime Provinces. She seeks out ocean views and other restorative places. A single woman with an old dog draws attention, and she readily makes friends with other campers, residents, and a philosophical hitchhiker who asks, “Did you ever wonder if you met yourself on the road in a strange place, you’d recognize who you were?” The year was 1980, and her own trust and kindness seemed to invite that of others. She runs into the same travelers repeatedly, accepts invitations to visit others in their homes, and maintains correspondences for months and perhaps years afterward. When she mentions Alaska, some she meets are excited by the idea but most raise their eyebrows, especially about heading north so late in the season. Toksook Bay? She doesn’t seem to know, herself, that the Yup’ik village is not just “Alaska” but on an island far to the west, facing the Bering Sea.
Halfway through the book, three weeks after leaving her home, she’s firmly against continuing to Alaska. “She needed to make Gary (her husband) understand the Alaska trip was not going to happen.” But after a stop at her daughter’s college near Buffalo, N.Y., her husband on a phone call demands that she continue to Alaska and she agrees to drive as far as the Canadian Rockies.
Time on the road and in the narrative speeds up considerably after that. Jeanne learns that her husband has another woman in Florida — something readers might have deduced much earlier. “The only choice she could see was to go forward. Why not keep driving until she figured things out? Who knew what the road had to offer?” She drives up the Alaska Highway, where she runs out of gas and is rescued by kind men. She drives through whiteout snowstorms. In Whitehorse the dog has a medical emergency, other kind people help her, and she rushes on to Fairbanks to reach a veterinarian.
To tell much more of the story would give too much away, but suffice it to say that the old dog’s condition keeps Jeanne in Alaska until spring. She does actually get to Toksook Bay, surprised by the small plane, the numerous stops in and around Bethel, and her relatives’ request to bring a box of fruits and vegetables.
Throughout her travels, even as she continues to grieve for her son, Jeanne finds much to love about the world, in people and in nature. When a raven flies over her head in the quiet of British Columbia, the woman from New York is stunned to hear, for the first time in her life, the sound of a bird’s wings. Later, she’s entranced by the song and sight of a dipper (water ouzel), “flying just above the surface of the water following the curve of the creek. He settled on a boulder downstream and with the burbling waters rushing around him, he sang out again an ebullient medley in whistles and trills.”
In the end, “Out of the Dark” is a story of trust, self-knowledge, and healing. The journey with Jeanne/Elliott satisfies not only as a road trip marked by the kindnesses of strangers; readers will delight in the company of a woman traveler who grows into the self she’s in fact happy to recognize.
[Book review: A reluctant memoirist reflects on a tragic family story — and considers forgiveness]
[Book review: Riveting memoir reveals lifetime of lessons from teacher’s time in Alaska village]