Ashley Marie Farmer's debut collection of essays, "Dear Damage," opens with a straightforward description of an act of violence that shook her immediate family and shocked their Nevada community: "On January 19, 2014, my grandfather Bill walked into my grandmother Frances's hospital room with a loaded gun he'd purchased that morning." Her grandmother had been injured after a fall at home that left her paralyzed with "a type of neuropathy that causes an unrelenting pain that the strongest drugs don't touch." Frances had said more than once that she wanted to die. In what was meant to be a final act of love, Bill shot her in the hospital bed, then tried to shoot himself, but the gun broke, and he was arrested. It was deemed a "mercy killing," with all the sensationalized press coverage and impassioned public debate a case like that tends to spark.
This cataclysmic event is the axis around which Farmer's meditations and explorations of family, place, grief, loss and violence revolve, in essays that take both traditional and experimental forms. "Remembering an act of violence born not out of malice, but love," Kat Chow writes in the New York Times, "Farmer's narrative is melancholic, but still full of hope."
