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Summary
Summary
"Stunning." -- Entertainment Weekly
"Raw and perfect." -- Laura Miller, Slate
"Heartbreaking yet hopeful." -- Samantha Irby, Marie Claire
"[Perry] is a wonderful writer...Beauty and tenderness rise up through the darkness...[She] succeeds in restoring her mother's humanity, and her own." -- Bliss Broyard, The New York Times Book Review
A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.
When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah's bedroom.
The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction--all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah's questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother's life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.
Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.
Author Notes
SARAH PERRY holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and was publisher of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art . She received a writers' fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and a Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Perry was 12, her mother, Crystal, was murdered in their home in rural Maine, outside Perry's bedroom. Her riveting memoir navigates the absences, silences, and solitudes that follow trauma. Perry, who now lives in Brooklyn and was the publisher of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, wonderfully evokes her mother even as she struggles to unravel the mystery of her death. In the 12 years between Crystal's murder and the killer's conviction, Perry tried to move forward, even as she faced police interrogations and scrutiny from officers who believed she remembered more from the night than she was telling. Perry reveals a family shattered in the wake of tragedy. She was shuttled among relatives and friends, living in Texas and then in Maine again, where she worried the killer still lived, haunting her small-town streets. Perry vividly portrays her mother, and she introduces the troubled men in her mother's life: her estranged husband, Tom; her ex-boyfriends Dale and Tim; and her fiancé, Dennis. Other men and women move in this circle, all with secrets of their own, such as Teresa, Tom's new girlfriend. Perry's memoir is a testament to one child's ability to survive the unspeakable, one woman's ability to recapture what was lost, and a fascinating small-town mystery with breathtaking revelations at the end. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A thin wall was all that stood between then-12-year-old Perry and her mother's murderer. Although she escaped with her life that terrible night, shock waves from the crime would reverberate heavily in the years to come, as she details in this stunning memoir. Her mother, Crystal, the youngest of 10 children in a family riddled with abuse and neglect, married her father at age 15 and gave birth to Perry a few years later. After the couple divorced, Crystal dated a string of men, who would later become suspects in her slaying. With chilling, photo-realistic recall, Perry recounts what she witnessed that night, then unpacks the impact that her mother's murder had on her as she grew up, bouncing between homes with different relatives. It would be years before an arrest was made in Crystal's case, and, all the while, Perry feared the killer still walked the streets. The depth of Perry's loss is brought into painful relief by her adoring tribute to Crystal, a daughter's love burning brighter than the shadow cast by her mother's tragic end.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FIVE-CARAT SOUL, by James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.) In his debut story collection, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel "The Good Lord Bird" continues to explore race, masculinity, music and history. McBride's stories often hum with sweet nostalgia, and some even dispatch a kind of moral. THE APPARITIONISTS: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, by Peter Manseau. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) Manseau's expedition through the beginnings of photography and its deceptions is a primer on cultural crosscurrents in mid-19th-century America. GIRL IN SNOW, by Danya Kukafka. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Danya Kukafka's bewitching first novel spins a spell of mournful confession around a "Twin Peaks"-like centerpiece. In Kukafka's capable hands, villainy turns out to be everywhere and nowhere, a DNA that could be found under the fingernails of everybody's hands. DUNBAR, by Edward St. Aubyn. (Hogarth, $26.) In this latest entry in Hogarth's series of contemporary reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays, "King Lear" is recast as a struggle for control over an irascible father's corporate empire. St. Aubyn's version, not unlike the play itself, turns out to be a thriller. THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown, $26.) In the future of this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe. BLACK DAHLIA, RED ROSE: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder, by Piu Eatwell. (Liveright, $26.95.) An account of the brutal killing of a beautiful young woman that also delves into the broader culture of postWorld-War-II Los Angeles. "Her story," Eatwell writes, became "a fable illustrating the dangers posed to women" by Hollywood. AFTER THE ECLIPSE: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search, by Sarah Perry. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) This memoir moves swiftly along on parallel tracks of mystery and elegy, as Perry searches through the extensive police files pertaining to her mother's murder, when Perry was 12. THE DARK NET, by Benjamin Percy. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) The fate of the world in Percy's novel depends on the ability of a motley gang of misfits to head off the satanic forces emanating from the murkiest recesses of the internet. GHOST OF THE INNOCENT MAN: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, by Benjamin Rachlin. (Little, Brown, $27.) Rachlin writes about Willie Grimes, imprisoned for 24 years for a sexual assault he did not commit, in this captivating, intimate profile. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
In an accomplished debut memoir, a daughter struggles to understand the life of her mother, who was murdered when the author was 12.An only child, Perry became a problem for her relatives: her unstable grandmother, aunts who lived near and far, and a father who had left her mother years before and willingly gave up parental rights. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Perry was questioned relentlessly by the police, who intimated that she was somehow complicit in the murder: she must have seen something, or she must have known the killer whom she was protecting. She was haunted by the murder and fearful that the killer would return to murder her, too. Shuttled between relatives in Maine, she finally ended up in Texas, where her mother's sister Tootsie was stationed with the Army. When Tootsie suddenly and harshly sent her back to Maine, she was taken in by her former babysitter, who claimed to have been her mother's best friend, a woman incapable of understanding Perry's emotional state. "My sadness was overwhelmed by fear and visceral disgust and rage," writes the author, "rage so consuming and aimless that sometimes I was afraid of myself." At one point, she considered suicide; instead, she deliberately tamped down her feelings. An unsympathetic psychologist concluded that her "effort at control" was "sinister," indicating that she was somehow involved in her mother's death. The killera man her mother may have knownwas apprehended and convicted 12 years after the crime, but the information disclosed during the trial only made her mother more mysterious to Perry. Two TV dramas later documented the case, but the author felt the story was unfinished, inspiring her quest to understand her mother's life, the series of volatile men she lived with, her community's culture of violence, and her family's deep wounds. Despite some repetition, deft pacing and vivid portraits result in an absorbing mystery and a forthright memoir of abiding grief. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
One night when she was 12, Perry awoke to her mother's screams as she was being stabbed to death in the house they shared in rural Maine. Accounts of Crystal Perry's life and her daughter's attempts to find her way afterward alternate in this distressing yet affirming debut memoir. Passed around among relatives, never really finding a home, and always feeling fearful and angry, Perry obsesses on the men who might have killed her mother. She recalls Crystal's life as a working-class single mom, living in a town full of alcoholism, dysfunction, and violence, and she remembers the closeness the two shared. Memories of her mother's scraping together enough money from hand-stitching moccasins to buy them a small house bring both solace and pain. Even considered a suspect herself at one point, Perry had to undergo intense police interrogation on and off for 12 years, until the killer was apprehended. Perry succeeds in revealing Crystal as a fun-loving, caring mother whose determination to survive inspired her daughter to achieve an education and succeed as a writer. Emily Woo Zeller captures each character's voice. -VERDICT Recommended for memoir and true crime enthusiasts who are looking for an intense listening experience.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY -Geneseo © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
