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50 Miles
Fifty Miles is a memoir in linked essays that addresses addiction and alcoholism. The book traces the life and death of the author's son, Gray, a talented but troubled young man, to a drug overdose at thirty, as well as the author's own recovery from substance abuse.
- GenresEssaysNonfictionMemoir
200 pages, Paperback
Published January 21, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 15, 2023
In 2018, I read St. Germain’s book of poems, The Small Door of Your Death, addressing the fatal overdose of her son at the age of thirty. This book covers his life and death (and much more) through linked-essays, along with a couple of poems. She did something similar, with the topics of family and home, in Swamp Songs (a memoir, and maybe my favorite of her works) and in Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, a poetry collection. Her works are master-classes of content and form, proving how fruitful it is to rework, reuse, re-explore.
The essay about her son’s early struggles at school with an unaccommodating (to say the least) school-district in Texas and a too-accommodating medical community reads as a call-to-awareness. In lyrical essays, she writes of her guilt; her own struggles with alcohol; her recovery; and reminders, even to herself, that her son was much more than the label of an addict. I thought she might lose me in her piece about crocheting and in her lengthy essay about multiplayer role-playing video-gaming. Both take on ways of healing, as well as the latter being about communication with her son. And, no way: She never loses me.
As a companion to her call-to-awareness essay (my term), the final essay reads as a call-to-action. She and another professor created a program, Words Without Walls, within their university’s MFA program, of going into the community—prisons, rehabilitation facilities—to lead creative writing classes. She knows she’s not a savior—she and her cohorts are writing coaches, she emphasizes—but she helps in the best way she knows.
In the introduction St. Germain writes of her incessant reading of survival memoirs after her son’s death. She cautions the reader that her book is not one of those, as her son doesn’t survive. I beg to differ only in that the book illustrates how Sheryl herself has survived. I know she doesn’t think of herself as a role model, but generally those are the best people for the “job.”
The essay about her son’s early struggles at school with an unaccommodating (to say the least) school-district in Texas and a too-accommodating medical community reads as a call-to-awareness. In lyrical essays, she writes of her guilt; her own struggles with alcohol; her recovery; and reminders, even to herself, that her son was much more than the label of an addict. I thought she might lose me in her piece about crocheting and in her lengthy essay about multiplayer role-playing video-gaming. Both take on ways of healing, as well as the latter being about communication with her son. And, no way: She never loses me.
As a companion to her call-to-awareness essay (my term), the final essay reads as a call-to-action. She and another professor created a program, Words Without Walls, within their university’s MFA program, of going into the community—prisons, rehabilitation facilities—to lead creative writing classes. She knows she’s not a savior—she and her cohorts are writing coaches, she emphasizes—but she helps in the best way she knows.
In the introduction St. Germain writes of her incessant reading of survival memoirs after her son’s death. She cautions the reader that her book is not one of those, as her son doesn’t survive. I beg to differ only in that the book illustrates how Sheryl herself has survived. I know she doesn’t think of herself as a role model, but generally those are the best people for the “job.”
June 29, 2022
I snagged this book at Flannery O'Connor's Birthday Party in Savannah, Ga. last month, when The Book Lady Bookstore invited local writers to set up in Lafayette Square near the Flannery Childhood Home. My old friend Sheryl St. Germain & her partner Teake Zuidema moved to Savannah during the pandemic, & she was at the festival. This is a collection of linked essays about the addictions rampant in Sheryl's New Orleans family, her own battles with substance abuse, & her son's death at 30 from a drug overdose. Before Georgia, Sheryl taught at Chatham University in Pittsburgh (& I worked for her teaching in the low-res MFA program for a few years.) I wouldn't normally choose a book about grief at this moment, because there's so much of it, but I loved this book. I very much enjoyed Sheryl's lyrical, well-crafted, & deeply felt prose, her brutal honesty, and her abiding love for her son. The "50 miles" of the title refers to miles she drove to a friend's house when she got clean and the miles her son drove to his friend's house where he overdosed. The book was published in 2020 by Etruscan Press.
February 25, 2024
Tough first essay but then I was gripped.
September 15, 2020
If I had to choose one category of book to read, it would be prose written by poets. Poets are forced into brevity and mine deep meaning in every syllable to get a worthy point across. When they carry that skill into a longer work, it is thrilling. Patrick Lane’s What the Stones Remember is one such long lush banquet, and Sheryl St. Germain’s 50 Miles is another. Delight in a couple of excerpts:
"I can feel myself back to the falls, kneeling, cupping my hands and dipping them into the water that rushes like arterial blood from the wound in its ice-white skin.
That’s the mystery of fog, as anyone who’s attempted to drive in it knows, that it does not respond as darkness does to light, by opening up a way, but rather just reveals more of itself. The powers of light are not useful in fog. "
The story told in 50 Miles is presented as a series of essays by a mother, St. Germain, whose son, Gray, dies of a drug overdose. The reader knows from the outset that Gray will die, but the essays are presented in the time frame during which she is trying to save him.
The book packs the drama of a spy or detective novel. It begins by acknowledging Gray’s death, then creates the suspense by going back to the beginning and bringing the reader through the spine-tingling, unbearably dangerous twists and turns leading to the inevitable ending. 50 Miles is woven with a mystery writer’s storytelling sense and the poet’s eye for just the right heartstring, just the right nightmare image.
Gray is the scion of a family cursed with addiction and suicide. He is pulled into the downward spiral so familiar to St. Germain herself from the moment he enters public school, where the staff is ill-equipped to deal with him. St. Germain writes, Once a diagnosis of ADD is made of a child, that label tends to dominate, even though the child may be, like Gray, bright, quick, heartbreakingly insightful and imaginative.
St. Germain deals with the worry that comes from phases of maturation familiar to most parents: the kid acts up in class, the young adult avoids his mother, the teenager indulges in destructive behavior. Most parents, however, don’t wake up one morning and realize the destruction is not a blip, a phase, it’s now the way it is.
Though readers may not be near death themselves or know anyone in immediate threat of it, it is a phantom that visits in our sleep, or a waking nightmare, a drag on our energies. How to live with that phantom is one of mankind’s oldest challenges, and St. Germain makes a vibrant contribution by reminding us that one way to keep the past alive and the future touchable is through storytelling.
Her essays connect things, the way poets do: sea stars with her son, spaghetti puttanesca with grief. When Gray dies, her essays are single short, numb, crammed paragraphs, conveying in their brevity the felt futility of words.
Perhaps it is because I am old and carry a burden of regrets, losses, and unresolvable mysteries that this book so connected with me. Nobody becomes old without being forced into making compromised decisions, without letting others make decisions for you, without being battered by the occasional run of bad luck or the oppression of time. For that reason, young people should read this book, too. It is distressing that life will be cruel, but hopeful to know that people can get through it all somehow, and that the life that remains becomes precious, layered, funny, and rich.
Then, suddenly, the poetry turns defensively prosaic with a long first-this-happened-and-then-that-happened chapter on gaming. St. Germain seems to have run out of the energy required to distill this subject into virtuosic prose-poetry.
The book concludes with a chapter on St. Germain’s recent support of students struggling with addiction. Her well-informed devotion to the welfare of her students can serve as a guide to others witnessing the grief and seduction of addiction—but that is another book, or should be.
These final sections are so different in tone and content from the body of the book that they might be better presented as addenda. In them, St. Germain renounces her muse and becomes a mere mortal again. The sudden loss of poetic power comes as a shock and diminishes the overall effect of her tremendous accomplishment.
"I can feel myself back to the falls, kneeling, cupping my hands and dipping them into the water that rushes like arterial blood from the wound in its ice-white skin.
That’s the mystery of fog, as anyone who’s attempted to drive in it knows, that it does not respond as darkness does to light, by opening up a way, but rather just reveals more of itself. The powers of light are not useful in fog. "
The story told in 50 Miles is presented as a series of essays by a mother, St. Germain, whose son, Gray, dies of a drug overdose. The reader knows from the outset that Gray will die, but the essays are presented in the time frame during which she is trying to save him.
The book packs the drama of a spy or detective novel. It begins by acknowledging Gray’s death, then creates the suspense by going back to the beginning and bringing the reader through the spine-tingling, unbearably dangerous twists and turns leading to the inevitable ending. 50 Miles is woven with a mystery writer’s storytelling sense and the poet’s eye for just the right heartstring, just the right nightmare image.
Gray is the scion of a family cursed with addiction and suicide. He is pulled into the downward spiral so familiar to St. Germain herself from the moment he enters public school, where the staff is ill-equipped to deal with him. St. Germain writes, Once a diagnosis of ADD is made of a child, that label tends to dominate, even though the child may be, like Gray, bright, quick, heartbreakingly insightful and imaginative.
St. Germain deals with the worry that comes from phases of maturation familiar to most parents: the kid acts up in class, the young adult avoids his mother, the teenager indulges in destructive behavior. Most parents, however, don’t wake up one morning and realize the destruction is not a blip, a phase, it’s now the way it is.
Though readers may not be near death themselves or know anyone in immediate threat of it, it is a phantom that visits in our sleep, or a waking nightmare, a drag on our energies. How to live with that phantom is one of mankind’s oldest challenges, and St. Germain makes a vibrant contribution by reminding us that one way to keep the past alive and the future touchable is through storytelling.
Her essays connect things, the way poets do: sea stars with her son, spaghetti puttanesca with grief. When Gray dies, her essays are single short, numb, crammed paragraphs, conveying in their brevity the felt futility of words.
Perhaps it is because I am old and carry a burden of regrets, losses, and unresolvable mysteries that this book so connected with me. Nobody becomes old without being forced into making compromised decisions, without letting others make decisions for you, without being battered by the occasional run of bad luck or the oppression of time. For that reason, young people should read this book, too. It is distressing that life will be cruel, but hopeful to know that people can get through it all somehow, and that the life that remains becomes precious, layered, funny, and rich.
Then, suddenly, the poetry turns defensively prosaic with a long first-this-happened-and-then-that-happened chapter on gaming. St. Germain seems to have run out of the energy required to distill this subject into virtuosic prose-poetry.
The book concludes with a chapter on St. Germain’s recent support of students struggling with addiction. Her well-informed devotion to the welfare of her students can serve as a guide to others witnessing the grief and seduction of addiction—but that is another book, or should be.
These final sections are so different in tone and content from the body of the book that they might be better presented as addenda. In them, St. Germain renounces her muse and becomes a mere mortal again. The sudden loss of poetic power comes as a shock and diminishes the overall effect of her tremendous accomplishment.
April 26, 2020
Collection of essays by the well-regarded poet revolving around the death of her adult son, Gray, from a drug overdose. St. Germain has addressed the subject before, in her strong poetry collection "The Small Door of Your Death," but there is a lot of fresh material here (and some of the pieces, you realize jarringly, as you read them, were written before Gray died). Lots on the nature of addiction (St. Germain herself is in recovery), being the mother of an addict, loss and mourning. She also explores how writing can help the healing process, for herself and others.
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May 10, 2020If anything about addiction or death or grief triggers you at all, do not read this book. If you want to know more, ask me or go ahead and read it.
Pseudo review: I don’t like giving a book like this a star rating because it’s so intensely personal. I usually can for memoirs but not for this. I can’t believe she was able to even write this book after everything she lived through, but I think she had to. Some of this is set in Dallas- not far from where I lived for 14 years. (Tiny complaint: wish she had a better proofreader)
Pseudo review: I don’t like giving a book like this a star rating because it’s so intensely personal. I usually can for memoirs but not for this. I can’t believe she was able to even write this book after everything she lived through, but I think she had to. Some of this is set in Dallas- not far from where I lived for 14 years. (Tiny complaint: wish she had a better proofreader)
February 17, 2020
Deeply personal and poetic. Journeys to a glacier in Alaska and the Amazon rainforest are particularly moving.
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