If you’ve chronically, over the past decade, attempted to keep a diary only to always rip out the three scant pages from fear of being boring or emotionally dishonest;

If you often find yourself flipping through other people’s family photo albums when they leave you alone in their living rooms;

If you’ve always wanted to believe, really believe, that a magician has pulled a rabbit out of nowhere, but always find yourself searching for the top hat’s trick bottom;

Then you’ll be spellbound by Aug 9 — Fog.

Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan is a meticulously assembled work, shaped over 10 years with language pulled from an elderly woman’s diary that was nearly thrown away at an estate sale. The original diary barely holds its shape, crumbles each time Scanlan handles it, is “mostly undecipherable” on the bottom third of the waterlogged pages. In the introduction to the curated version , she says she read it “compulsively,” is still moved by it, asks if it’s “some kind of sacred text — for me alone?” Reading her arrangement, I find myself similarly enraptured, willing to worship at the altar of the everyday. Here, the ritual of documentation elevates the mundane. In these tiny prose blocks, surrounded by white space, the day-to-day is held aloft.

My mom died nearly four years ago. Immediately after, I signed up for group grief therapy. There, three old women talked about their dead husbands while I talked about my dead mom. We all read the same, saccharine self-help book. I never filled out the accompanying guided journal. Sometimes, it felt like they looked at me with a different sadness than they did each other. Sometimes, I thought that was just me projecting, wanting to be as singular as I felt. One week, we were asked to bring in objects that reminded us of our loved ones. Pat or Deb or Dee brought in one of dozens of pearl-snap shirts; Deb or Dee or Pat brought in a personalized belt buckle; Dee or Pat or Deb meant to bring her item, but forgot; I meant to bring my mom’s diary, but forgot. 

When I read my mom’s diary, sometimes I feel like I fall into the gaps, desperate to divine the answers to questions I didn’t think to ask. What emotion lies under a crossed-out exclamation mark, whether a crossed-out word reads lover or if I’m rewriting the story. 

My mom died in a small, lakeside town. In the days leading up to her death, I watched the US women’s Olympic soccer team win the bronze medal match between middle-of-the-night boluses of morphine, and tried to force myself to eat something at the Waterfront Diner, whose patio pointed squarely away from the water. I’ve attempted to write closer to this point, never quite able to hold tragedy and mundanity in the ways I set out to. Aug 9 — Fog is a masterclass in portraying life as it materializes: simultaneous and unornamented. 

In winter: 

Maude ate good breakfast, oatmeal, poached eggs, little sausage. Maude ate her dinner pretty good. A letter from Lloyd saying John died the 16th.

In fall: 

He called. Not so good. Bleeding again. Trying to knit pincushion. 

and

I am cooking apples. He’s not vomiting any today.

In this quiet, plain syntax — this sparse, careful assemblage — the logistics of time, 5 years passing, falls out of view. The book leaves you with the experience of tenderly holding the present before it slips away as if it were a small animal. To steal the book’s language, a “Fine snow rabbit got away.” 

In winter:

No one to church. All home today. D. washing feathers in her pillows.

and 

Sure pretty out. Sure grand out. D. Making a new piecrust. All better.

In spring: 

Seen 8 9 10 11 jets tonite, 2 airplanes & new moon while we were eating supper 6 to 6:45

In summer: 

Things sure smell fresh. Some hot nite. Flowers beautiful. Ruth brought muskmelons.

Reading Aug 9 — Fog, I feel the weight and lift of living not through tracing a narrative arc but through the accumulation of simple declarations: “Found condemned bridge & we didn’t cross it” and “Peaches white with pink center like we used to have.” Here, the world declares itself simply in verbless or subjectless phrases, putting the emphasis on the observed world, inviting the reader to engage in the act of viewing, of living, alongside the writer. When the speaker goes “out to cemetery little bit,” “Out to Mother’s grave with flowers,” “out to cemetery decorating,” my instinct is never to ask why or how or for more but to appear there with her before gliding to the next moment as it is conjured out of thin air. My usual need — the one I feel when I read my mom’s diary — to know all of the answers is suspended like disbelief. 

Aug 9 — Fog teaches me when I return to my mom’s diary to not ask anything of it, but to allow its details to unfurl in front of me:

Find of the day, glass bluebirds

Heaving sod and shoveling mulch — aggression

On to Iowa, so tired still dark an eerie fog stretched across the landscape

Dream —  very large walking stick insect

Sometimes, seeing my mom process the loss of her parents on the page, I see myself, my grief nesting inside hers like a Russian doll:

I miss her smile, I want her to wrap her arms around me and tell me “It’s all gonna be okay, Red.” I know it will someday.

After the storm we were so busy cleaning the course, I forgot about dad for awhile.

But who knows. I question everything these days.

7 months since dad died. Missed him a lot today

Refund for dad’s home insurance came in. Made me sad. It is still a struggle filling out paperwork. It is not that hard, but I still struggle.

Of the diary in her possession, Scanlan says “I have possessed this work so thoroughly that the diarist has ceased to be an entirely unique, autonomous other to me… The diary has become something like kin–a relation who is also me, myself.” In Scanlan’s gathering of the diarist’s language, this intimacy is palpable: the speaker’s voice, Scanlan’s hand, and the world as it unravels, all inextricable from one another. Looking at my mom’s diary in her absence, it becomes a new vantage, another way of understanding not just her, but myself: like kin, for me alone.