There’s something entirely and innately satisfying about reading about someone who’s life has not even gone remotely where they want it to and who manages through sheer force of will or happy circumstance to turn things around.
Maybe it’s because that so rarely happens in real life, at least to the extent that it does in books, or perhaps we want to believe that nothing is irredeemable and that even the worst of decisions can find some sort of healing reversal?
Whatever impels us, if the urge seizes you to read about someone’s life getting a much-delayed happy-ever-after then you should immediately go to a bookstore and buy or borrow from your local library or download to the e-book device of your choice, the luminously charming, emotionally muscular joy that is Sincerely, Me by Julietta Henderson (The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman).
In a genre crowded with protagonists finally living their best life, Sincerely, Me stands out simply because it mixes redemptive possibility, and actuality as the book progresses, with some sagely grounded admissions about darkly difficult life can be.
The protagonist in need of some consistently meaningful life direction is Danny Mulberry, a man who only lasts in jobs for days or weeks at a time, who drinks far too beer on too regular basis at a dingy local pub and who is estranged from everyone that matters in his life, including most sadly his younger sister Lou and her daughter, his niece, Wolfie.
And the thing is, it’s not always like this. In the days and weeks and even months between those sofa holidays, there are plenty of times it feels like we could be on the verge of being almost as happy as Larry.
Because my [Wolfie] mother’s not depressed, she’s just sad and we’re waiting for it to pass.
The one bright spot in an otherwise addled life is the fact that he lives with his bestie Dom and Dom’s six-year-old son in a gorgeous house in a lovely suburb where he has, rather oddly but very Danny-like, to live in the garden shed rather a beautifully appointed bedroom, believing himself not worthy of such loveliness when his life is such a train wreck.
Dom is unfailingly generous and kind, and has been since the two met at an Arctic Monkeys concert in 2009, and he is the one saving grace of Danny’s blighted life which has never really recovered from the unlikely death of his mum 26 years earlier.
Danny looks doomed to keep drinking and disappointing on an epically awful scale when a drunken night, some bright red, semi-philosophical graffiti on the footpath and an arrest and attendant media coverage leads him to somehow be presented as a life guru with all the answers.
The irony of being portrayed thus is not lost on Danny who knows only too well what a messy failure his life is, and how far he is from being a guru on anything to anybody, but events soon overtake him and before he knows it he is dispensing surprisingly insightful advice, the kind only someone who has seen the worst of life can give, and reconnecting with Lou, Wolfie and a sober life that actually, surprise, surprise has real meaning and purposeful emotional connection.
If this was all Sincerely, Me was, and honestly it’s so well written it could just be a warmhearted story of redemptive love and it would sing happily anyway, it would be just fine as a story that makes you feel better about the world.
But Henderson elevates it beyond just being a feel good tale by going deep into what drives someone to let their life go profoundly off the rails and how even if we can recognise there is trauma in our lives, that we can’t often do anything before it.
Trauma is enervating and enfeebling and often all you can do in the face of its sheer soul-destructive horrors is to call up into a fetal position of your choosing and medicate as you see fit; healthy? Most definitely not but then trauma is not something you can merrily skip past or through.
Danny, Lou and by dint of being raised by a survivor of trauma (however lovingly), Wolfie are all well acquainted about how it feels to be caught in trauma’s web and Henderson informs their story of reconnectedness and healing with how arduous a climb it is for any of them to get to a place where the healing can even happen.
You can sense the longing for something better in every word of Danny’s story – he and Wolfie share chapters, which roughly alternate between their respective points of view – and know how badly he wants things to be different and it makes Sincerely, Me feel so achingly, desperately sad and yet so full of hope and possibility too.
‘Danny, what I said earlier. About Lou and me.’ She looked me [Danny] square in the eyes and you’d better believe I was paying attention. ‘It kind of feels like … I don’t know. Like maybe it isn’t just us any more.’
Before the words even hit my ears, there was a puff of cool air as the door opened and closed and she was gone. The shed suddenly seemed huge.
Enough for a dozen Petes.
The beauty of Sincerely, Me is that its characters are so beautifully well-formed.
While there’s a fairytale-esque quality to their stories, their slow climbs back to something approaching a satisfyingly happy and connected life, one made up of long-delayed heartfelt admissions, emotional vulnerability and stinging but necessary home truths, feels very real and desperately honest, imbuing the novel with a truthfulness that can’t help but deeply affect you.
You will fall in love with these characters, especially Danny and Wolfie, because they are so real, because they are hurting so much and you want to hold them close, and because as Sincerely, Me progresses in its grounded realness and hopeful wondrousness, they finally beginning to see their lives get some much longer-for beauty and shine.
Sincerely, Me sings to the heavens with writing that is lovely and emotionally weighty all at once, a love letter to what second chances, however much they might feel undeserved, and forgiveness can do to ailing lives, and how tentative first steps can quickly become a race to fall into far too long shunned arms and hearts.
Reading this book feels like a hug to the soul but it also joyously feels like walking closely with someone, all too aware of their flaws, losses and frailties, and knowing how real and hard it can be to find healing, but that it is possible, and when it comes, rewrites life in ways that make the future feel less like an emotional death sentence and more like a thrilling ride into the wonder and love you wanted all along.