what I'm reading: The Past Is Never — catherine wallace hope

Hello, people! Here is my chance—at last!—to talk about a sumptuous and spellbinding novel. The Past Is Never was originally released in March of 2018, and if you didn’t get to read it when it first came out, I can highly recommend it now. So why did it take me so long to read it? I was so thrilled to get my copy that cold March day, and I looked forward to talking to the author, my dear friend Tiffany Quay Tyson, about the long-anticipated story. But by the end of Chapter One, I knew I had to put it down and not look at it again for who knows how long. When I realized what the book was about, I knew it would have to wait, and the reason was because I was deep into the creation of my own novel and it looked at first as if Tiffany’s story might have a comparable element.

A funny thing happens when you’re writing a novel. If you are unwise enough to talk to other people about it, their inclination is to recommend that you read stories that sound similar. I’ve learned this is a mistake. The risk, for me anyway, is that there might be some cross-pollination that keeps me from doing my own deepest exploration. As I work to discover a story, I like to steer my own reading toward things that contrast, things that feed my hungry mind but don’t interfere with immersion in my own process (and my neck-deep piles of research).

Tiffany and I have the same agent, the lovely Sandra Bond, and when I told her I’d had to save Tiffany’s book for later because I was concerned about cross-pollination, she assured me that I needn’t worry, Tiffany’s book had a completely different feel and I should read it, that it was wonderful. And it is. Now that my novel is complete, I’ve gotten to read my friend’s novel. Here are some of my impressions of it.

The novel starts with mystery, an opening that’s vividly and gorgeously descriptive but very troubling, setting a reader’s pulse on edge, creating the drive to know how such a circumstance came to be. Thus, the narrative begins to unfold. The current-day story opens with the disappearance of six-year-old Pansy. In the sweltering heat of a Mississippi afternoon, the girl and her older siblings seek the cool relief of a swim in the local quarry, a forbidden place with secrets living in the depths of its past. When teenage siblings Willet and tomboy Roberta—Bert—leave the child alone just long enough to step away from the water and find some berries to snack on, they are separated in a peculiarly discordant thunderstorm, and when they find each other again, Pansy is missing. As the aftermath of the kidnapping unfolds, so, too, does the memoir of the quarry itself. Alternating chapters detail the background of the quarry that has determined the course of the haunted family’s life and what each of them must do to either hide or uncover the truth.

Tiffany’s prose takes the reader through events dark and lyrical, inhuman and redemptive, delicately carved and yet brutally stark, all the way through a lush emotional landscape to an ending that was foretold but still causes an ache upon recognition, the fulfillment of an inevitable answer when the two time lines meet.

It was probably for the best that I had to wait to read The Past Is Never. Stories seem to me to have a right time in the lives of their readers, and once my own novel was done, it was the right time for me to read my friend’s beautiful story. I’m so glad I’ve had a chance now to share some thoughts about it. As our agent said, it’s wonderful.