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What We Remember

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Synopsis

Every family has a hidden story—even the perfect ones. Dig just a little, beyond the smiling holiday photographs and the oft-repeated anecdotes, and other memories come flooding back—the kind that can compel a family to stick together through catastrophe, or drive a chasm between them forever.

On the morning James McCloud, a Seattle district attorney, gets a call from his sister, Celeste, he senses his own long-buried family history is about to be dragged into the light. James’s father, Daniel, a police officer, disappeared eight years ago. Now his body has finally been found. James always believed that his father committed suicide after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the evidence leaves no doubt: Daniel was murdered.

James immediately returns to Cold Falls, New York, to be with the rest of his family. His mother, Ada, seems worn out and blank with disbelief. James’s brother, Billy, is twenty-one, gay, and even more troubled than James remembers. His brother-in-law, Nate Derry, is the town sheriff charged with investigating the case, and the mistrust that has hovered between them—ever since James dated Nate’s stepsister Nancy years ago—still exists. When James’s high school ring is discovered with Daniel’s body, making him the prime suspect, the McCloud and Derry families are both thrust into controversy and chaos. And as the truth emerges, piece by piece, so do the shadows and secrets in each relationship—secrets powerful enough to threaten another life and destroy the bonds that still remain.

Both suspenseful and deeply moving, What We Remember paints a compelling, thought-provoking portrait of a family as ordinary, as unique, as comforting and strange as our own. With unerring insight and candor, Michael Thomas Ford explores the complex ties—between fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, mother and child—that we may strive to leave behind but are compelled to carry with us, and reveals how little we can ever know with certainty, especially about those closest to us.

Review

A bleak story of animosities and buried secrets, and the power of memory to influence a family's life, What We Remember examines the lives of the McCloud family. It is 1991 and the body of the Daniel McCloud has been found after he suddenly vanished back eight years previously, and leaving behind a suicide note telling his wife Ada he had cancer. Ada is understandably shattered at the discovery, along with her three children James, Celeste, and the youngest child Billy.

For years the family have tried to navigate the roads of temperance, while James has left the area and moved on and now lives with his girlfriend Charly, Celeste has adopted a more conventional life in Cold Falls, mothering two children and marrying Nate Derry, the cocky town sheriff who has long-buried ties to the McClouds. Only Billy seems to be drifting, his shattered life marred by substance abuse, but it is perhaps Billy who holds the key to what happened to his father.

While Nate constantly reminds Billy of his shortcomings and resents his sexuality, nonetheless, it is also Nate who accuses James of murdering his father when a bejeweled ring that once belonged to James is discovered with the body. When Charly comes to Cold Falls to help prove James' innocence, Michael Thomas Ford adds layer upon layer of drama to this story as Charly's investigations causes a dark secret to unfurl and the revelation that Nancy, a childhood friend of the boys, was secretly sent away to Maine after she was discovered to be pregnant.

Ford beautifully balances the tender scenes of family intimacy, particularly Ada and her determination to keep her children safe from the preying eyes of the past, with the wider mystery as his novel accelerates forwards, and allegations of rape reinforce the unsaid tension between Nate and James and Billy. It is these implicit animosities, long built up that have their seed in the tragic events of 1982. The mystery behind Daniel's death is finally revealed and in the process his family learn some painful insights, along with all of the angst that must come with the demands of family and the need to belong.

What We Remember signifies Ford's maturing as a writer and he perfectly captures the hormone-driven frustrations of a generation of teenagers as they're thrust amid the uniquely the stifling mores of suburbia, and also the complicated layers of family and friendship that are eventually torn apart by the endless passage of time.

-- Mike Whitt