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Hieroglyphics
I've kept an eye on McCorkle's work since enjoying her previous novel Life After Life; astute readers will spy a connection between the two works, though it's not necessary to read them in order. Her writing is gorgeous and evocative. Frank and Lil are in their eighties, retired and recently relocated back to North Carolina, both looking back on the life they know they'll be leaving soon. As Lil compiles mementos of the past and writes letters for her daughter to have once she's gone, she's drawn to reflect on sobering events that happened decades ago—scenes from her childhood, her courtship, and earlier in her marriage. Frank is a retired teacher who's at a loss without his students, and is now single-mindedly focused on his childhood and the home he grew up in. That home connects the two to Shelly, a courtroom reporter in the midst of a gruesome trial, and who has a tortured past of her own. I listened on audio; the book was wonderful—if heart-wrenching—in that format.
About the Book
“Hieroglyphics is a novel that tugs at the deepest places of the human soul—a beautiful, heart piercing meditation on life and death and the marks we leave on this world. It is the work of a wonderful writer at her finest and most profound.”
—Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle
A mesmerizing novel about the burden of secrets carried across generations.
Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both—suddenly, tragically— lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely.
Now, after many years in Boston, they’ve retired to North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries—perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d hoped to keep buried. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember.
Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.
Other books in the "14 introspective audiobooks"
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