The Tender Land: A Family Love Story

"The Tender Land" is a love story unlike any other. In her remarkable debut, Kathleen Finneran renders powerfully the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family relationships--their closeness and disconnection, their intimacy and estrangement, and their ultimate resilience. The Finnerans--parents and five children--are a seemingly ordinary family until their lives are forever altered by the death of the author's younger brother. His suicide at fifteen serves as a focal point for Finneran's spare and elegant portrait of her family, its sorrows and its joys. "With subtlety and grace and a heartbraking compassion for the truth" (Book), Finneran pays tribute to the enduring love between parents and children, brothers and sisters.

This sensitive, restrained memoir searches for answers to the most painful of questions: Why would a bright, athletic, seemingly well-adjusted boy like Kathleen Finneran's 15-year-old brother want to take his own life? Sean Finneran's 1971 suicide is the pivotal crisis in The Tender Land, but not the only one. References to a family strain of depressive mental illness sound a warning note; Finneran's maternal grandfather probably killed himself, and her mother is subject to severe bouts of depression that may also have afflicted Sean, whose suicide note reveals a self-hatred that the love of his parents and siblings could not assuage. The author frankly relates her own problems with weight, an inexplicable but irresistible urge to shoplift, and uncertain sexual orientation. But Finneran's precise prose, rich in evocative physical details, convincingly limns an ordinary, generally happy Midwestern family: five children spread over 16 years; a devout, nature- and animal-loving mother; a father who communicated best without words, rooted in "his faith in materials men make of the earth." There are no villains and no answers in this heartbreaking book, which respects the essential mystery of a shattering tragedy and closes with an affirmative message to Sean: "I want to call out your name and tell you, across the tender land, that we have gone on living." --Wendy Smith