FESTIVAL DAYS

Beard returns to creative nonfiction.

“Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn’t stop.” This is the opening line of the first piece, and it may take readers a few moments to realize that “she” is a dog. This sense of disorientation serves the piece well. Brief and heartbreaking, “Last Night” details the decision to euthanize a beloved pet, and anyone who has struggled with this choice knows that uncertainty is part of what makes it so difficult. One might assume that this vignette is personal, but the piece works without a biographical hook. The question of genre is significantly more complicated in “Werner,” the story of a man who escapes a tenement fire by diving from his apartment through a window in the building next door. The protagonist, Werner Hoeflich, is an actual person, and the author fleshed out what she learned from him with details of her own creation. The result is both gripping and meditative. Beard’s ambiguous approach is more disturbing in “Cheri,” which recounts the last days of a woman with terminal cancer who died with the assistance of Jack Kevorkian. This story was also based on interviews, this time with the protagonist’s daughter, but Beard has said that much of her piece is pure invention. In a 2011 Bookforum article, Beard said, “If I called it fiction, pretended Cheri Tremble was a figment of my imagination, it wouldn't be interesting to readers, and if I treated it as journalism and wrote just facts, it might have been mildly interesting to readers but not at all interesting to me as the writer.” Readers can make of that what they will, but the resulting piece lacks the immediacy of “Werner,” and it’s possible that trying to honor fact while indulging in fiction is part of what makes this piece feel ungainly. The rest of the essays vary in style, substance, and quality.

A rangy collection, sometimes insightful, uneven, and occasionally unsettling.