“It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” ― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Each of us, no matter how seemingly put together, is broken. We are all parts of a whole, and we spend our entire lives looking for people who fit together with us—even momentarily—to form something that feels complete. If we're really lucky, we find that missing piece and they stay with us forever. But sometimes—a lot of the time, really—people stay broken. There is no piece that fits together with them. In Fran Kimmel's The Shore Girl we inhabit half a dozen of these broken souls, and if they don't exactly form a whole with each other, then as an ensemble, as a cast, they most certainly do. The Shore Girl feels complete.
The Shore Girl is told through a series of perspectives, all of which centre around young Rebee Shore. Rebee, on account of her dysfunctional mother, lives a nomadic life. Rarely is she settled in one place for long, always is she grappling with her mother's addictions and fears. The story repeatedly jumps between Rebee and temporary influencers—her aunt, her teacher, a beneficent stranger, a neighbour—each of whom are different, but all of whom struggle with the same issue: the ultimate cost of love.
If The Shore Girl is about anything it's about the burden that love brings. It is the most complicated, messy, infuriating, and instinctual feeling we experience, and as people we have no idea what we're doing with it half the time. Our feeble attempts at expressing it often fall flat and when it comes to receiving it the results are even worse. Love leaves us vulnerable, and when things don't work out, it fucking hurts. Sometimes it doesn't seem worth it. Sometimes it isn't worth it. But most of the time, no matter how grim things seem, love pulls us through.
What The Shore Girl illustrates better than most books is that love isn't simple. It isn't a zero sum game. It's not always absolute. There are grey areas. Not everyone's good at it. But trying means so much. Trying is sometimes enough. Even when love isn't perfect, it's still there, fighting.
"I thought about the men in this world who settle next to the rhythm of a woman, one woman, their whole lives ... I’m a believer. I just don’t know how it’s done is all. What kind of chromosomes, hormones, cyclones bring all that together? Do you fall hard for a woman because of the light in her hair? The look she gets when she’s looking at you? And if you fall for one reason do you stay for another, until there comes a time when you can’t remember why you fell in the first place but you don’t even notice because it no longer matters. Somewhere between your falling and landing, what floats in between? What anchor drops to hold a man steady?"
Despite never having a narrative point of view of her own, this story is, arguably, about Rebee's mother, Elizabeth (or Harmony, as she prefers to be called). Ill-fated from birth, Harmony can do nothing but play the hand she's been dealt much of the time. Her cards aren't good, and she plays them even poorer than most. We should loathe her for the life she's left her daughter, but through bits and pieces of backstory we come to learn that judging her is more complicated than it first seems. At the end we understand that Harmony was never good at loving her daughter, but she tried, and in this case, trying was probably enough.
The Shore Girl is not a happy story. Instead, it's a hopeful story, a resilient story. It makes wonderful use of perspective (the best I've read in some time), and absolutely justifies the conceit. It's not a gimmick. It's a necessary device in order to tell a multi-layered story.
What's best, though, is that Kimmel never resorts to sentimentality. In lesser hands, this story would have been irredeemably maudlin. It would have been easy to focus on the pain and the tragedy of Rebee's life, but Kimmel simply documents what's happening. She shows, and rarely tells—in the best way! Her restraint is exceedingly impressive for a first time author (she has the balls to describe a mother handing her twelve-year-old daughter a beer without a word of judgment).
The Shore Girl is that special book that gets better with each reading. Much is left under the surface, which allows us to mine gems during a second or even third reading. Some readers I've talked to have claimed that Kimmel left too much on the table, that she left her story unfinished. That couldn't be further from the truth. Any ambiguity is there by design, and cheers to her for writing a story that actually gets better with time. In a literary world that's becoming more akin to Hollywood every day, a book like Kimmel's—one that asks a little from its readers—should be held dear.