SOMETHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING

In this debut memoir, Delory recounts her husband’s struggle with PTSD following his deployment to Afghanistan as well as her own troubled childhood.

When the author became engaged to Chris Barksdale at the age of 22, he hadn’t planned on joining the Army; the plan was that he would save up to attend nursing school while she attended grad school. But he decided that enlistment was a sensible path to financial stability, and she reluctantly agreed. He was deployed to Afghanistan, and the combat he experienced took a brutal emotional toll on him; his resulting PTSD and “crippling anxiety” were so severe he finally had little choice but to exit the military with a pension—a benefit that Delory calls, with livid clarity, the “going rate for a man’s soul.” Years later, even after counseling, Chris remained lost in a fog of trauma, and the author sadly discovered that her patience, and even her sympathy, had all but evaporated. She conveys her exasperation in these pages with simplicity and power: “I know whatever it is that’s eating away at him has hardened me. I used to be kinder than this.” Delory also details the turmoil of her early years; she tells of growing up in a dysfunctional home with troubled parents “from broken homes, one an alcoholic, both of them high school drop-outs.” She writes that she, like her father, had a tendency to drown sadness in alcohol—an intuitive reflex to suppress despair with oblivion. The author’s memoir is brief and stylistically unadorned. In straightforward language, she unflinchingly documents the ordeals she’s suffered, but for all her admirable candor, her remembrance never devolves into dour self-pity. In fact, the account offers moments of self-effacing humor, as when she discusses her drinking: “as I got tipsy, I’d remind everyone, ‘I’m not drunk; I’m a Delory,’ because it’s not sad if you’re proud of it.” She covers ground that will be familiar to those who’ve read memoirs by members of military families, but she does offer keen insights. Overall, this is an affecting and bravely confessional work.

A moving recollection of love for the wounded and its frustrations.