BREAKUP

A journalist reconstructs how his decision to cover a war in the Central African Republic led to the dissolution of his marriage.

In 2013, Sundaram, the award-winning author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, was living with his wife and daughter in Shippagan, a tiny coastal town in New Brunswick. The birth of their daughter eased some of his loneliness but also incited in him a desire to resume his work as a journalist. “I searched my past,” he writes, “seeking work to which I felt an old connection, that had shaped me, and to which my link felt elemental, pure, necessary.” Ultimately, he planned a reporting trip to the Central African Republic, where a brutal conflict was not receiving even a fraction of the coverage that it deserved: “Central Africa, home to several long-running wars, rarely made the first page.” The author recounts how he met his wife, Nat, while they were both war correspondents in the region, so he thought that she would understand his passion for the project. Over the course of his trip, though, he found himself simultaneously gathering strength from their relationship and avoiding communication with his family about the dangerous details of his assignment. A near-death experience at the hands of angry rebel soldiers, among other traumatic events, led Sundaram to return to Canada in “despair,” with his emotions “in a jumble.” Admitting that his behavior led to estrangement from his wife, he still tried to “regain the internal peace that one’s home offered” and “the confidence that our family would again find cohesion.” Sundaram’s descriptions of wartime Central Africa are riveting, and his political analysis is intriguing. The detached tone, however, provides little insight into Sundaram’s feelings about either the atrocities he witnessed or the family he left behind, leaving readers with more questions than answers.

An introspective, emotionally detached memoir about war and family.