While You Were Gone

by Sybil Baker

When their father is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the sisters cope with the loss in different ways. Recovering from divorce and the collapsing journalism industry, Shannon manages a bottom-feeder rag and considers having a child for her cousin and his lover, an Army veteran. After Paige is kicked out of her band, she becomes obsessed with a reclusive songwriter she wants to make famous against his will. Claire’s family and career are threatened by her attraction to a new hire she supervises, an African American who ignites her passion for literature and the deeper questions it asks of her. But, when their family’s uncovered secrets threaten all they’ve known, the sisters will have to choose between lives they’ve dreamed of and those they love. Inspired by Chekhov’s Three Sisters with echoes of King Lear, While You Were Gone traces the journeys of three sisters growing up in and returning to a home-town that, like them, seems to reflect a new South. But beneath the surface changes are secrets that run as deep as the Tennessee River. While You Were Gone explores how three sisters living in the American South in the twenty-first century deal when their own dreams collide with their own misconceptions about family, race, gender, and the larger world.

Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2018

About the author

Sybil Baker’s latest novel is While You Were Gone. Her book of nonfiction Immigration Essays is the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is also the author of The Life Plan, Talismans, and Into This World (Foreword Book of the Year finalist, and Eric Hoffer Award Honorable Mention). She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and a 2017 Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She lives and teaches in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is on faculty at the Yale Writers’ Workshop and VCFA’s low residency International MFA

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was captivated by this heavily character-driven novel and its exploration of the ways that culture and family ties complicate and re-route the dreams of youth. The story is populated by individuals and families whose crossing of borders and other limits causes them to revisit personal memories, embedded as those are within family histories, recorded and concealed. Though the novel is self-consciously allusive (most openly in the cases of Chekhov and Shakespeare but with plenty of more covert instances too), it has an energy all its own and can be thoroughly enjoyed simply as the narrative of a family rooted in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee. The author has a fine sense of structure that carries the story along while continually enriching the portrayal of three sisters who serve as its lenses and voices.

[Max Davine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sybil Baker's While You Were Gone wears it's influences way out on it's sleeve. The story of three sisters - one of whom does contemplate Checkov - and their growth from the death of their mother in adolescence to the various ways their lives turn out contrary to how they had planned.

Baker's writing style is journalistic. There are, however, some moments of lyrical beauty that find their way in and add a certain poetry to the richly developed characters. Chattanooga, the city in which the lives of the sisters unfold, is very much character in and of itself and takes on the suburban labyrinth that symbolizes both their origins and their failures.

A family saga that allows its heroines to be deeply flawed and therefore feel very real.

[Shannon Minninger · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy summer read set in my own backyard of Chattanooga, TN. For me, the references to the city, while accurate, were a little too overt, but that’s probably just because I’ve heard them my entire life. I loved the entertwined stories of the three sisters though and appreciated the “real” characters.