Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s novel “Irreversible Things”

Lisa Van Orman Hadley introduces her debut novel  Irreversible Things, the winner of the 2019 Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize.

Summary: Brimming with wit and heart, Irreversible Things follows three decades in the life of author-qua-narrator Lisa and her charismatic Mormon family, from childhood to puberty to adulthood. From a young girl grappling with early friendships, first crushes, and a beloved neighbor’s shocking murder, to a young woman beginning her own family, dealing with infertility, and caring for a father with Alzheimer’s, this work expands our understanding of the novel form, weaving together memoir, fiction, and the fiction of remembering.

I live in an old neighborhood. When I’m walking my kids to school, I notice a lot of trees that have grown into the sidewalk. The trees lift and dismantle the cement. It happens slowly. There is only a hairline crack at first where the roots are applying steady pressure. Then the hairline crack becomes a quarter-inch crack and then a half-inch crack. Then the sidewalk breaks into pieces. I’ve always been interested in finding the lines between things—what people think is the line between things—and then writing inside that crack until it expands and dismantles and, like the tree and the sidewalk, everyone becomes confused about what belongs where and why. Where is the line between fact and fiction? Between novel and memoir? Between short story and prose poem? Between memory and imagination? Between comedy and tragedy? Between menswear and womenswear? Between believer and skeptic?

I started writing Irreversible Things thirteen years ago during my second semester of my MFA program. In many ways, the book wedged itself into a hairline crack that was starting to form in my life. My new husband and I had recently moved across the country for graduate school, from Utah to Massachusetts, and I felt a certain amount of malaise in my new surroundings. In a matter of a few years, I got married, moved across the country, found out I was infertile, my dad started showing signs of dementia, and my husband told me he didn’t want to be Mormon anymore. It felt like nothing I knew about my life applied anymore.

I tried, in my new graduate program, to write twenty-page stories that bore no resemblance to my own life but they were lackluster and I felt bored writing them. And then I suddenly found myself writing about my childhood in Florida and Utah and about my family in my spare moments, and it was almost like I was having a hot, secret romance with nonfiction. I wrote about my neighbor and family friend who was murdered on the side of my house when I was seven. I wrote a lot about my mother—the central figure of my childhood. I wrote about lice day at school and singing solos in church and being the only kids in the neighborhood to trick-or-treat on Saturday because Halloween was on a Sunday. I wrote about things that were mundane and lighthearted and things that were bizarre and unbelievably dark. I worried about how my family would react but I couldn’t stop. I also worried that I was writing about my life when I was supposed to be writing fiction. Perhaps it was because I was in a fiction program that I was so compelled to write autobiographically. I’ve always had a little bit of a rebel in me that has lived alongside my inner rule-follower. I quietly do what I want while appearing to the outside world to acquiesce. I started to submit the stories in place of fiction. My teachers and cohorts, to my surprise, liked the stories and encouraged me to keep going.

Then some of the things I was currently experiencing started to show up in my writing. The father in the stories started to show signs of dementia just as my own dad was forgetting who he was. The fictional Lisa struggled with infertility, just like the real-life Lisa. I knew this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. You weren’t supposed to write about yourself, and you really weren’t supposed to write about something while it was still unfolding. You needed distance from your material. But the stories were an oncoming train and I couldn’t stop them. I started to experiment with form. I found that coming at the stories from a different angle—pouring them into unconventional containers—gave me just the amount of distance I needed to write in medias res. I’ve also always used humor to deal with hard things and I tried to infuse the stories with the same humor and unsentimentality I use in real life in order to grapple with the difficult material. I wrote one story in reverse chronological order. I wrote another as a Choose-Your-Own Adventure. One was framed as a game of Truth Or Dare and another was written as a fill-in-the-blank Mad Lib.

I soon discovered that thinking of the book as memoir felt too limiting and thinking of it as fiction felt wrong, too. I was writing about my own life, but sometimes I found a thread and pulled it out to see if the whole thing would unravel. Sometimes I embroidered on top of my own experiences, creating new meaning and new storylines. I realized that it wasn’t helpful to me to think about whether I was writing truth or fiction—what was useful was to try to tell the best story. Somewhere along the way, I also came to question whether there really was a line between “truth” and “fiction,” anyway, or whether it even mattered. These words from The Things They Carried really resonated with me, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

And so, all of this is to say that thirteen years later I have a book on my hands that I still don’t really know how to describe. Irreversible Things is not quite a novel and it’s not quite a memoir and it’s not quite a book of short stories. It’s not quite true, but it’s also not exactly fictive. It’s tragic and comedic and stoic and over-the-top, all at the same time. I hope you like roots and broken cement.

Lisa Van Orman Hadley graduated from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She received the Larry Levis post-graduate fellowship, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and a Millay Colony fellowship to work onIrreversible Things. Her stories have most recently appeared in Epoch, New England Review, and The Collagist. Lisa lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Editor’s note: The AML Novel Award judges have kept me appraised of their deliberations, and Irreversible Things is certain to be one of the finalists. Get a jump on your AML finalist readings and pick up a copy today!