Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn's incisive debut memoir, Loose of Earth, explores the fallout from Blackburn's father's colon cancer diagnosis in 1990s Lubbock, Tex., and depicts Blackburn's evangelical mother's increasingly desperate attempts to save her husband's life by acts of faith.
The oldest of five children, Blackburn was a young teenager already starting to question her parents' rigid views when her father was diagnosed. She watched as her parents sought out increasingly outlandish faith healers who made dramatic claims, and as her mother's strictures on diet and behavior grew more exacting, and she wondered if faith (or the lack of it) had any bearing on her father's health. As an adult, Blackburn extensively researched the link between cancer diagnoses and the presence of harmful chemicals developed for use in household and industrial products such as nonstick cookware and firefighting foams. The memoir juxtaposes this research against vivid scenes from Blackburn's childhood and her present-day attempts to understand her parents' actions.
Like its windswept west Texas setting, Blackburn's narrative contains both harsh realities and seductively powerful illusions. She details the tightknit community and the impossible promises of the church her family belonged to; her struggles to care for her siblings and her resentment toward her parents for keeping them so isolated; and her grief at the death of her dad and the rock-solid certainty of her belief. Quiet but unsparing in its gaze, Loose of Earth is an unusual faith-deconstruction memoir that deals with the fault lines in a family and the unseen but real environmental hazards that threaten the health of human beings and the earth they walk. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams