Halfway from Home: Essays
by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Split Lip Press, 2022. $16.00, paperback.
Reviewed by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson
It’s not often I read a book that resonates as deeply as Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essay collection, Halfway from Home, did. Friends had recommended the book to me, so I expected to enjoy it. However, I didn’t expect to savor each essay, the book becoming more full-bodied as it progressed.
The collection of seventeen essays examines the themes of nostalgia, home, and grief, among others, as Montgomery surveys familial relationships and the landscape around her. Ranging from gemstones to the prairies of Nebraska, extinguishing fires to navigating overdoses of people familiar to her, the pieces stand alone and may, at first glance, seem disparate from one another, but they accumulate meaning and cohesion as pages are turned.
I like to read with a pencil in hand, underlining sentences I want to come back to, bracketing thought-provoking paragraphs, placing a star next to resonant passages. As I flip through the pages of Halfway from Home, I’m surprised more of my copy isn’t marked up. But, as I reread portions I inscribed, I recognize it’s because the essays are fully realized; I was in a flow state for much of the book. Every opening is enchanting. The development: watertight in its weave, each idea an extension of its predecessors and a guiding branch to what was to come. The conclusions: strikes that took my breath away. To mark up everything eliciting a response in me would be to mark up the entire book. Indeed, the collection is a master class in writing the segmented / mosaic / braided essay. The places I set graphite to paper were merely moments I came up for air: “Is it lonelier to be the starving polar bear, the ice crumbling beneath its feet, or the videographer, already hurting from what hasn’t happened, a haunting in reverse?” (115).
Montgomery opens her essay “On Reflection” by stating, “I can recall the moment I realized the girl staring back at me in the mirror was already past, that the reality reflected in the glass was of a time already gone” (95). In thirty-two words she opens a world and provokes questions for the essay to answer: when and where was this moment? How old was she? What prompted this awareness? What are the implications of her newfound understanding?
There is just as much movement in the corresponding conclusion: “Astronauts tasked with leaving in order to move humankind forward to the edge of the galaxy, to live where darkness was so deep there was no light to reflect, were compelled to turn back, nostalgic for what they’d abandoned” (104). Forward and back, dark and light, leaving and returning: the contrasts make for an enthralling tension.
Montgomery’s final essay, “Practicing Goodnight,” is exquisite in how it interworks themes not only present within the essay but tethered to the rest of the essays preceding it in the book. The second to last paragraph laments, “I am still a child. I am still searching for a mouse, a moon, for anything that will keep me with Daddy longer. I do not want to close my eyes and wake up to a different world. I am still so afraid of the dark” (177). In four short sentences, she recalls the threads of nostalgia, the dark, her father, digging, sleep cycles, celestial bodies, perception, and grief–themes readers have been immersed in throughout the book–thus inducing the book’s ending to reverberate, resplendent.
As should be clear, Montgomery is an incredibly smart writer. Her instincts for telescoping in and out, examining the multiple facets of her subject matter for nuance, and mining the ordinary to find the extraordinarily meaningful details makes for a rich reading experience:
Reflection is both the mirrored image and careful rumination. I’ve been avoiding the image because I’ve been avoiding the thinking. . . . But these images I’ve avoided are not true reflections, and each is already gone. . . . This doesn’t mean we forget history or stop aching for it, mourning it if we must, but rather that living requires we keep some distance between our past and our present, we keep our many selves in sight in the rearview mirror, as we determine which path to take and where to deviate.” (103-104)
How beautifully she guides the reader’s eye, onward and rearward, here and gone, oscillating between tension points. If, at the book's end, readers aren’t contemplating their own experiences, regardless of their semblance to Montgomery’s, then it is their loss for not engaging more with the material.
Whitney (Walters) Jacobson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Punctuate, Feminine Collective, Up North Lit, After the Pause, and In the Words of Womyn International, among other publications. She is currently working on a collection of essays exploring skills, objects, and traits passed on (or not) from generation to generation. She maintains a curiosity in memoir and the themes of feminism, water, inheritance, blue-collar work, and grief.