Book Review: Making Friends with Monsters

Title: Making Friends with Monsters 

Author: Sandra L. Rostirolla

Date: 2023

Publisher: Pinkus

ISBN: 978-0-9991891-9-1

Quote: "My father died by suicide when I was thirteen. Because my family never spoke about the issues leading up to and resulting from this devastating event, we suffered a great deal."

So Sandra Rostirolla wrote this novel about an Australian farm family during the year when everything goes wrong and nothing goes right for them. 

Content warnings (may spoil the plot for those who want to feel any suspense about the outcome of a Story Written to Help People Speak About Issues): Just about every unpleasant thing that can happen to a family happens to this one. They're poor because the farm's had several years of drought in a row. When the father goes out taking his gun, they worry that he's not defending sheep from predators but committing suicide. The mother earns extra cash staying with a disabled neighbor who shows the family her home suicide kit. While Ben, playing the bad-boy role, is quarrelling with their father, narrator Sam, playing the good-boy role, loses an arm in an accident. Ben has reasons to suspect that Sam, though younger, is the real firstborn son of the man they call father, which turns out to be the case. Ben's girlfriend is pregnant. Ben commits suicide. Sam accuses their mother of killing Ben and then realizes that their mother has in fact tried to use the patient's home suicide kit on the whole family, but fortunately the patient hadn't hoarded enough pills to kill more than one person and only the mother, who intended suicide, ingested enough to make her ill. By way of a dramatic climax Sam's girlfriend, who is not yet in any danger of pregnancy, reveals her mental health "monster." There are other plot events in which these people react to their emotions rather than solving their problems rationally, but those are the highlights. 

What do I think? I think there is no way of talking about the "feelings" we have about the bad things that happen to us that really makes us happier, even if we know somebody who has a theory that if we talk about the feelings in a certain way, or to a certain degree, we'll feel better. When things or people who matter to us die, we grieve. When regrettable things that are less final than that happen to us, we get choices: to react to the emotions we inevitably feel (stupidity) or address and, if possible, correct the reality of the situation (intelligence). In other words: 

Fix Facts First: Feelings Follow. 

At the end of the book Sam and his family have taken what may be the first steps on their road to recovery: they've been forced to acknowledge that serious problems exist. Sam's mother has gone from projecting her suicidal thoughts onto Sam's father (there's room for a few points to be scored, here, about firearms phobia) to admitting that she's the one who's thinking seriously about suicide. It would be good if she'd come as far as admitting that her problems revolve around being an alcohol-intolerant person in an alcohol-tolerant culture, but she's not. So the family are, from psychotherapists' point of view, ready to begin talking around and around their problem in psychotherapy, paying for weekly discussions of every possible emotion before they get bored enough with their emotions to think about changing their reality to solve their reality problems. Talking and writing about the emotions may feel good, may inspire some "creative art" exercises, may even help identify some other reality problems before they escalate. But nobody's actually doing anything about the real problem, yet.

The trouble is that stories about people who've moved directly into solving their reality problems tend to skip over the emotional drama. In Althea we don't spend chapters with the real Althea Gibson's feelings, which she undoubtedly had, about the father who taught her street fighting skills, beginning lessons with a punch in the face. We're told that that's the situation from which Gibson got out by smashing tennis balls with the same strength she'd learned to smash attackers' faces. We seem to need separate stories like Making Friends with Monsters to talk about that; to want to believe that there are people who need to talk about their reality problems, and then there are people who need to solve them and accomplish things. We seem to distrust the idea that those are likely to be the same people as of Tuesday and as of Wednesday.

I give this debut novel full marks for creating an appealing family and characterizing them well. I'd be delighted to read the sequels in which they've stopped letting their emotions form "Monsters" and started solving their reality problems and accomplishing things.