Is/ Was

by Jenny Sampirisi

It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each days news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wrens death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions of the child, the adult, and the bodycome unmoored.

182 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2008

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Sampirisi’s Is/Was is a quietly shattering novel, defined by the tactility and fragility of both its language and its construction. Told through a succession of files.. the disappearance of Abigail Wren, an eight-year-old who unfolds in a small Ontario town in 1983. The book pieces together her disappearance as seen through the Fitch family—a couple and their two children, one the same age as the missing girl.
Sampirisi writes in prose that is delicate and raw, sometimes uncomfortably intimate. She probes the porous borders between memory and language, blurring what is spoken with what is felt or withheld. Rather than dramatizing trauma, she reveals it in the minute, piercing details that are often unexplained and unresolved. But time does pass.
The novel recalls the atmosphere of HBO’s Mare of Easttown—its attention to the ordinary and the damaged, and its recognition of beauty in endurance and silence.

[Sophia McIcky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really broke my heart in so ways, it gets inside your head and under your skin with it's deeply poetic prose. The experience of each character with their pain, their heartbreak, their anger, and their panic nestling inside your bones. The visceral familiarity of it all is consuming and overwhelming.

As an aside, I'm sad to see such a creative author only wrote two books, because their work is so unique but I'm happy to have come across this one in my reading journey though.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I thought this book was a little too post-modern for my tastes, but it ended up winning me over. Sampirisi is a talented writer and is able to capture a lot of emotion with minimal words/effort. The book really draws you in.

[amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a difficult book to get through and couldn't finish because the characters feelings get in the way of the plot, but I think I will try it out one more time. The subject matter is the kind that draws you into the book and holds you there.

[Kevin Gallan]

very good