Book therapy
In the middle of the journey of her life, Anne Gisleson felt lost — not so much in a dark woods, a la Dante, but at home in New Orleans with a metaphysical hangover. Her persistent dread was the aftermath of trauma: Hurricane Katrina piled onto the grief of losing two of her sisters. But friends were also grappling with the humbling disorientation of loss — divorces, deaths, midlife with its echo of endings, past and future.
Rather than grab the remote, a pill or the usual self-help nostrums, Gisleson went for the hair-of-the-dog-that-bityou cure. When an angsty friend suggested they hash out some philosophical ideas, the Existential Crisis Reading Group was born.
Each month in 2012, a fluid (and well-lubricated) group of pals convened to talk, drink and wrestle with life’s heaviest questions. (Alternate names for the group were the Futility All-Stars, and her favorite, the titular Futilitarians.) Epicurus and Ecclesiastes were on the menu, and so, of course, was Dante — and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the near-oracular Clarice Lispector. Ancients and existentialists shared the table; contemporary poetry was food for thought. Gisleson’s kids lingered on the periphery, eager for edible tidbits — the Futilitarians were sometimes contentious but reliably wellfed.
The meetings themselves are absorbing enough to make you crave an invitation, thanks to Gisleson’s slyly gorgeous writing. But she also uses them to profound effect as a kind of scaffolding, linear poles through which to loop her personal story, moving back and forth in time. One of eight siblings, she grew up with a devoted Catholic mother and a hard-drinking, hard-driving father — a successful lawyer who relished lunches in the august Rib Room, fought (pro bono) for men on death row, and taught that “we had to be careful with our words because that’s all we have to make ourselves.”
In this high-achieving family, one brother became a lawyer, and a sister a politician, but the youngest, identical twins Rachel and Rebecca, struggled all their lives. Rebecca turned to stripping and was in a troubling relationship with a club owner when she committed suicide. A year and a half later, Rachel also took her life, leaving a young child. Neither counselors nor doctors nor love nor tough love could save them, although second-guessing sharpened the devastation.
“Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity,” Gisleson writes. “Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”
Around the time she emerged from the worst of the grief, she married, happily, to a man who’d known agony himself: His previous partner had died of a brain tumor at 33. No sooner had the couple come home from their honeymoon than they were forced to flee Hurricane Katrina. Upon their return, the years of salvage began, the streets an open wound.
New Orleans has a visceral presence in these pages, a malleable face, at times a defiant gaiety, colored indelibly by the Catholic holidays. Its stories seep through its pores. “The trap of growing up in New Orleans: you’re often preoccupied with what’s been lost while clinging to a grand, cobbled present — part wreck, part fantasy, part regular civic striving, but always under construction.” Which seems an apt description for personal identity as well.
The Futilitarian year began with its own deep reckoning. The morning after the group’s first meeting, on the Feast of the Epiphany, her father insisted on going to see his Death Row client, despite being fresh off chemo for leukemia, with no immunity. He fell ill and died six days later. His passing, and the act that hastened it, shaded much of the year.
Between meetings, she visited graves with her mother, broke bread with her siblings at her father’s table in the Rib Room, and followed his path into the bizarre bowels of the Angola prison — meeting both his final client, who’d been released from Death Row into the general prison population, and a Death Row client of her lawyer brother. The need to fight for a life after you couldn’t save two of the people you loved most isn’t lost on her.
Gisleson’s story isn’t an easy, read-in-a-couple-of-gulps proposition. It demands time and attention. It requests a bit of rigor. Yet it offers a generous companionship, the solace of being seen. Take her description of midlife — “with its throbbing ambivalence and urgent doubt, occupying the highest and most lavish tower in the unwalled city. You can still make the stairs, the brocades are still bright, the tapestries a little worn in all the right places. Surrounded by the tapering beauty of all the seasons, you can enjoy the panorama and the action in all the streets and squares, even with the encroaching knowledge you’ll have to leave the city altogether one day.”
Refreshingly, she doesn’t offer answers so much as ask good questions. Among her most striking insights is “the necessity of others in our search to find meaning in ourselves.” Those others might be friends who invite you to their home. They might be great thinkers, living and dead. And they might be discovered in communion with a book about some friendly futilitarians.
Dawn Raffel’s next book, “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” will be published by Dutton in 2018. Email: books@sfchronicle.com