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How To Walk Away

von Lisa Birman

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Fiction. After three years in Afghanistan, Otis is adjusting to life back home. Struggling with post- traumatic stress disorder, he obsessively replays the traumas of war, cataloging the names of the dead. Cat, his wife, is a genealogist who makes maps of families in an attempt to understand her world. When a car accident takes Otis's left arm, he is grateful to bear a physical loss that makes his damaged emotional self visible. As he recovers, he and Cat confront the silences upon which their marriage is built. "Lisa Birman's cathartic, uncompromising look at the mind of a war veteran struggling with post-traumatic-stress and OCD is both harrowing and rhapsodic in turn. At the center of the book is the depiction of his relationship with his wife--all the light and shadow of daily life, the epic sense of separation, loss, paranoia, and homecoming. Birman's compassionate novel takes us behind closed doors into a world turned upside down but somehow familiar and totally real. HOW TO WALK AWAY belongs in the same company as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Hannah Weiner's THE FAST."—Lewis Warsh, author of ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR "HOW TO WALK AWAY is about coming home, often the hardest thing. Otis tells the reader: 'I know that numbers are dangerous. I know that letters are also numbers. I do what I can to steer around. Given the landscape. The history.' Lisa Birman's perfect book explores the secret byways of PTSD, the pandemic of our age. In original and powerful prose, circumnavigating surprises as they appear, it peels the layers of the onion until healing is within sight. This is the magnificent debut novel by a writer I know will give us many. Birman is a gorgeous storyteller with an ear for shaping language and a talent for creating people we learn to suffer with and love."—Margaret Randall, author of Che On My Mind and About Little Charlie Lindbergh "HOW TO WALK AWAY by Lisa Birman is an extraordinary book: at once a gripping, intense, grace-filled story, and a profoundly insightful mapping of minds grappling with the diamond-edged particularities of their complicated human conditions. I was struck by this novel's wisdom and the hard-won ease with which it wears it. A book to read slowly, to savor and to return to."—Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome… (mehr)

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I discovered Lisa Birman’s How to Walk Away at the biennial Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival in 2016 when I attended a session for debut authors. Although it won the Colorado Book Award that year, it’s not a book that’s had a great deal of attention either here in Australia (where Birman was born and educated) or in the USA (where she teaches creative writing for most of the year, coming home for the warmth of an Aussie summer). And yet it’s a stunning novel, one that deserves to be widely read.
It’s narrated almost entirely by Otis, a veteran of the Afghan war and struggling with Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with survivor guilt and with his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). After intensive therapy in childhood he had learned to control his obsessions, but the OCD has resurfaced with the trauma of war and he is floundering with the adjustment back to life at home as a civilian.
Rodney Hall’s most recent novel A Stolen Season (2018) traverses similar territory (see my review) but Hall’s central character Adam is catastrophically wounded and the focus of the novel is also on his wife and how their failing marriage comes under enormous strain when everyone expects her to be supportive. Birman’s character has no obvious injuries and because he looks the same as he did before he went away, he makes valiant efforts to be ‘normal’. But when the novel opens, it is obvious that all is not well: it is not just that he is obsessively counting things, but also that there are silences in his marriage.
Cat is a genealogist, and she makes her living constructing family trees for clients. She made one for Otis while he was away in Afghanistan:

"She wanted to send it to me but I asked her not to. I was already in Afghanistan and I didn’t know how to keep it safe without her. She was my map and I asked her to keep it with her until I got home. It wasn’t what she intended but I think she liked it. She sent me a photocopy with one of her letters and I touched each name to make it real. I counted all the people, seventy-two, and all the names, one hundred and seventy-seven. I counted all the lines and added all the dates. The last date was our wedding. 2000. Right next to the line that joined her name to mine.
I told her that for our next anniversary we should make another map. Fill out her hemispheres. It was strange to have everything leading up to me and just her name attached like she didn’t have a history. I could hear the statis at the other end of the line. We didn’t talk about it again." (p.3)

The reader soon learns that Otis is disorientated because not everything is as it was when he left. He had been warned that returning is not easy:

"They tell you the return will not be as kind as the leaving.
Which comes as a shock at the time. Usually in the midst of leaving. Imagining ourselves in the worst of it. Because it is not possible in that exact moment to think of dipping lower. Because we know the possible ending and cannot think ourselves there.
And so to hear that a safe return still falters, it doesn’t seem real. Maybe that’s how it is for other people, you think. Probably they already had problems. But that’s not us, you tell yourself. We were good and are good and will be better after this." (p.6)

He had been warned that the other will change but he is in denial...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/07/19/how-to-walk-away-by-lisa-birman-bookreview/ (

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anzlitlovers | Jul 19, 2018 |

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Fiction. After three years in Afghanistan, Otis is adjusting to life back home. Struggling with post- traumatic stress disorder, he obsessively replays the traumas of war, cataloging the names of the dead. Cat, his wife, is a genealogist who makes maps of families in an attempt to understand her world. When a car accident takes Otis's left arm, he is grateful to bear a physical loss that makes his damaged emotional self visible. As he recovers, he and Cat confront the silences upon which their marriage is built. "Lisa Birman's cathartic, uncompromising look at the mind of a war veteran struggling with post-traumatic-stress and OCD is both harrowing and rhapsodic in turn. At the center of the book is the depiction of his relationship with his wife--all the light and shadow of daily life, the epic sense of separation, loss, paranoia, and homecoming. Birman's compassionate novel takes us behind closed doors into a world turned upside down but somehow familiar and totally real. HOW TO WALK AWAY belongs in the same company as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Hannah Weiner's THE FAST."—Lewis Warsh, author of ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR "HOW TO WALK AWAY is about coming home, often the hardest thing. Otis tells the reader: 'I know that numbers are dangerous. I know that letters are also numbers. I do what I can to steer around. Given the landscape. The history.' Lisa Birman's perfect book explores the secret byways of PTSD, the pandemic of our age. In original and powerful prose, circumnavigating surprises as they appear, it peels the layers of the onion until healing is within sight. This is the magnificent debut novel by a writer I know will give us many. Birman is a gorgeous storyteller with an ear for shaping language and a talent for creating people we learn to suffer with and love."—Margaret Randall, author of Che On My Mind and About Little Charlie Lindbergh "HOW TO WALK AWAY by Lisa Birman is an extraordinary book: at once a gripping, intense, grace-filled story, and a profoundly insightful mapping of minds grappling with the diamond-edged particularities of their complicated human conditions. I was struck by this novel's wisdom and the hard-won ease with which it wears it. A book to read slowly, to savor and to return to."—Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome

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