Melissa Broder

The most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story. In Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike. Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant. This is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley.

A Novel

Death Valley

taylor miles hopkins

Doom is maybe just a trapped sob, I tell myself. Remember that.

"Help me not be empty,” I say to god in the Best Western parking lot.

It is easier to have an intimate relationship with the unconscious than the conscious, the dead than the living.

If ever I attempt to make the inside of my skull a softer place to live…

Maybe I don't have the self-esteem to feel angry.

The next book I read was a novel, described as the tale of woman "unraveling" after the death of her wife. All I could think was, Who unravels this neatly? There was no mention of fear. Zero messes or catharses. If a feeling did surface, it was an elegant dribble, pristine, assonant. Was this really the inside of a person's head?…

It was clear that the author had never, herself, unraveled. Also, she seemed to disapprove of humor in any form, which was another problem, because how could a person unravel so humorlessly and not die? If I saw no humor in my unraveling, I’d have been dead long ago.

It's not silence as the absence of sound, but silence as the presence of many sounds: bedrock and space, fauna and flora, all coming together to create an orchestral quiet.

Love floods into me: oxytocin, dopamine, sticky souls, the cleave of spirits, norepinephrine, bone and light, a covenant behind the ribs—whatever love is made of, I love this child. It's a love tinged with loss, or the anticipation of loss, the way I love my father the grown-up. To miss a person when the person is right beside vou.

…so content to be left alone, and I see it now: he has always been a self-contained universe! To wish it otherwise is to ask him to be a different person. Not really a fair thing to ask. Can you be other than you are?

I don't feel like a forty-one-year-old woman. I don't even feel like a twenty-one-year-old woman—the age I was when my bond with my father began to change, when I realized that it could change (and would change) because ld become an adult, and he was tired, and adults, with their adult demands for intimacy, their expectations and judgments, made him more tired, and that I would be treated like any other adult—any other person whose presence weighed more heavily on him than the small, light universe of a child.

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