Tailings: A Memoir

For such a slender book, this took a long time to read. The story is of a young woman (early 20's) who signs on to spend a year as staff at a remote Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade Mountains where she has been going with her family since she was a child. She expects her boyfriend (whom she calls The Intended for about half the book, before giving him his name) to come along a little bit later to be with her, but soon receives a letter from him saying that he's not coming, he's going to Europe with another woman instead. This echoes the break-up of her parents' marriage, where her father told her mother at the last minute that he was not coming to Holden Village with them. The story becomes one of struggling through an in-between time that bridges the end of an important relationship and the start of a new life at a writing program in the spring–yet to be determined which one, since the author is sending out applications in the fall and winter while she's at Holden Village. The in-between time involves a lot of casting around, trying to figure out what to do with herself–sleep with the cook? Drink a lot of red wine from a Nalgene water bottle? Hold herself at a distance from the rituals and procedures that the center has developed for governing itself? Her behavior is not exemplary, but her evocation of the sense of claustrophobia and doldrums that set in on the villagers as the winter progresses provides something of an explanation for that.

I enjoyed the book. I didn't think the author showed a lot of insight into her own state of mind or behavior, but I felt that her description of Holden Village as a place and a community made up for that somewhat.