Tom McKone
“The past is never dead,” Southern Nobel laureate William Faulkner wrote 75 years ago. “It isn’t even past.” In Hardwick writer Brett Ann Stanciu’s latest novel, “Call It Madness” (Regal House Publishing, 2026), baggage from past generations, discordant memories, rural poverty, alcohol abuse, and dysfunctional relationships are the context for an engaging, harrowing story about a side of Vermont some of us don’t see.
Protagonist Avah Lavoie opens this first-person story with a happy memory of visiting her great-grandfather in Vermont the summer she turned four, of the sunlight glimmering on the lake at the edge of his property, and of his introducing her to birds by their calls.
But this is not a sentimental journey: At 25, Avah’s life is a wreck. She’s living in Massachusetts, she’s broke, she constantly argues with her boyfriend, she drinks too much, and she hasn’t seen her mother in seven years or her father since she was little.
Soon after the Vermont visit, her mother told her that Opa, her great-grandfather, had died and his house had been sold. So it comes as a shock, two decades later, in 2016, when her mother calls to tell her to go to Vermont to pick up his ashes. Her mother had lied: The taciturn old man she had affection for had been alive all along.
So begins Avah’s journey into a maze of family secrets, conflicting stories, and disputed memories as she tries to piece together truths about her life and to understand the family history that drove her on this hard path. After a woman recounts a story about Avah’s family that someone had told her, the woman adds, “Maybe it was true. I don’t know. Or maybe it was partly true and partly not true. The facts are long lost.”
Whatever the truth is, the damage from generational poverty and alcohol abuse is deep, and it shows in the desperate choices Avah, her mother, and others make.
“In Avah Lavoie’s life, the decisions that were made and the actions that people made even before she was born, she carried with her in this world,” Stanciu said in a recent telephone interview. “We seem to think we’re directing our ship, but we’re carrying … baggage that often we’re not totally aware of, and it affects our life.”
Although Avah, as an adult, can sometimes be hard to like, through her childhood memories we develop affection and compassion for her. She wasn’t always this way, and this isn’t the life she had to have.
During a conversation with her mother, Avah recalls a memory that her mother disputes.
“I remember us as a family. I remember playing ring-around-the-rosy in the living room of the turquoise house where the rose bushes climbed over that big window. We sang that song — the sunshine song, ‘You are my sunshine.’”
“We never played games together. Beau (Avah’s father) would never have done that.”
“We did! I know we did. It’s madness to say otherwise. We were happy at one time, Mom.”
“You remember wrong, daughter.”
A captivating storyteller, Stanciu has written about the challenges of rural life, poverty, relationships, and substance abuse before. Her first novel, “Hidden View” (Green Writers Press, 2015), dealt with isolation on a Vermont farm and the stress it puts on a marriage. Her second book was the nonfiction “Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal” (Steerforth Press, 2021); it explored those issues in the context of small-town life and rural poverty.
Our memories, where and when we’re born, and our family, social environment, and economic situation can shape who we are, Stanciu said. Mentioning the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, she said it is very hard to “step out of that repetition of the past,” especially when that past is burdened with poverty and alcohol.
“One of the things I hope people get out of this book is the ability to ask questions (and) to be curious,” she said. “Why do people act the way they do? What do I not understand about them — both when they behave well and when they behave in infuriating ways? I think it’s always been a relevant question, but it’s super relevant right now — not to see each other in two-dimensional ways, but to really look into the longevity of our stories.”
Sponsored by Galaxy Books in Hardwick, the book launch for “Call It Madness” will be at the Judevine Memorial Library in Hardwick on June 30 at 7 p.m. The book is available at independent Vermont bookstores.
