THIS FAMILIAR HEART:
AN IMPROBABLE LOVE STORY
by
Babette Fraser Hale
Memoir / Relationships / Aging / Grief
Publisher: Winedale Publishing
Date of Publication: April 2, 2024
Number of Pages: 312 pages
In this intimate rendering of a relationship, we learn how deceptive surface impressions can be.
Leon Hale, author of Bonney’s Place, was sixty years old, a “country boy” who wrote about rural Texans with humor and sensitivity in his popular column for The Houston Post and, later the Houston Chronicle. Babette Fraser at thirty-six was a child of privilege, a city girl educated abroad, struggling in her career while raising a young son. No one thought it could work.
Even Hale himself held serious doubts. But it did endure. The interior congruencies they discovered through a long and turbulent courtship knit them tightly together for the rest of his life.
And when he died during the Pandemic isolation period, searing levels of grief and doubt threatened Babette’s understanding of the partnership and marriage that had sustained her for forty years. Had he really been the person she thought he was? Had he kept secrets that would forever change her view of him?
In candid, evocative prose, she explores the distorted perceptions that often follow the death of a cherished spouse, and the loving resolution that allows life to go on.
My Review
As the synopsis states, This Familiar Heart, is about a husband and wife, as told from the wife's perspective after losing him. It's cozy, it's heartbreaking, it's everything you might expect it to be, and yet nothing at all that COULD be expected. It's a love story, it's a healing story, it's a story of loss, it's a story of hope. While it is predominantly non-fiction, it IS treated early on as a story, before the frame of reference changes for the later stages of the couple's lives.
Babette Hale recounts meeting Leon Hale, how their friendship and relationship developed, and the challenges they both faced in becoming emotionally intimate. After the introductory elements, the book is narrated distantly, with two characters: Babette and Leon. It is told from an intimate third-person viewpoint before it shifts back to first-person. I have never read a book that does this for a memoir of sorts, but this book does it exceedingly well.
The life Babette and Leon shared feels like a story. Both struggled with relationships in earlier parts of their life and both had personal challenges they needed to reflect on and challenge for themselves - even though they ultimately found what they needed in each other. It's a beautiful narrative with ups and down, and the messiness that comes with real feelings and life changes. I loved that even though it could seem like a fictional tale at times, it was easy to know it wasn't - because of the depth of the emotions.
250 pages in is where I started to struggle, but that's largely on me and I expected it to happen. I don't do well with sad events and reflections and grief and loss. It hits me VERY hard and times - and it should. Things like this are supposed to. They're never easy. That being said, this is the point where other readers like me will likely also struggle to hold things together and continue on. Nonetheless, I urge you to continue. It's emotionally difficult, but it's worth it. Babette's voice is one that should be heard and that may be helpful to others suffering their own losses.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed this book, even with its more emotionally difficult moments. It was a beautiful reflection of a life well-lived and a heart-rending love. It wasn't expected, it wasn't typical, but it's incredible to read about. If you can push through the grief aspects as a reader, I recommend this book. It won't be a read for everyone at any time, but it's certainly worth giving a try if one is willing and prepared for it. I give This Familiar Heart a Lone Star rating of ✯✯✯✯ stars. The sadder elements don't allow me to push it to a five, since I would have a hard time revisiting it (one of my biggest requirements for the rating), but it has all the potential to be a 5-star read for the right reader who finds it at the right time in their life. It's certainly a book I recommend.
CLICK TO PURCHASE
Babette Fraser Hale is the author of A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, 2022 winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have received notice from Best American Short Stories, 2015 and the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review. In addition to writing fiction, Babette has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor, and publisher. She lives in Texas.
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04/16/24 |
BONUS
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