Theresa Weir
The Orchard
Grand Central Publishing, September 21, 2011, $23.99 print, $11.99 digital
The Orchard is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband’s family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations. She becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard, but she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll.
My criticism of romances filled with darkness often goes something like this: “The book’s unrelenting darkness went entirely over the top and into melodrama, piling one bad thing onto another. Real people’s lives are not the Perils of Pauline.”
After reading Theresa Weir’s new memoir, The Orchard, I may be forced to revise that criticism. Apparently one bad thing after another can befall a person. The question is...do I want to read it?
I think that’s what makes the difference between a novel and a work of non-fiction. No, I actually do not enjoy reading romances featuring a kitchen sink of tragedy. But when well written and thoughtful, I can appreciate a memoir written with an expert hand that takes me to some dark places. That’s why David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy sits on my keeper shelf, and Sebastian Junger’s War sits nearby. Weir’s book isn’t quite on that level for me, but it is thoughtful, well-written, and engrossing.
Unlike some readers, when reading fiction I rarely pay attention to an author’s personal life. And yet, when it comes to creepy stories, I occasionally wonder what must have happened in an author’s past to lead them into the darkness. My one experience with Weir’s writing was one of her early Anne Frasier novels. It was suitably creepy and generally well done, and when she asked me some months ago if I would read her new book, as a book whore it was my duty to say yes. When the book arrived, I realized it was an autobiography and asked myself what about her life was interesting enough to warrant a memoir.
Was she going to deliver a one-two punch like The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s reflections on death of her husband and daughter? Perhaps her story was about alcoholism, like Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club...or, god forbid, Kathryn Harrison’s incest memoir, The Kiss.
Quite frankly I knew it wouldn’t be a happy story—nobody publishes an autobiography filled with bunnies and unicorns, after all—so I set it aside until a few weeks before its publication date on September 21st. Then I put on my good girl panties and dug in.
The Orchard does indeed feature a great deal of darkness, sadness, and hardship, but with quietly affecting prose and a matter-of-fact style without any hand wringing. Weir has a story to tell, and so she does, describing her uncle’s bizarre imprisonment as an accessory to murder, her parents’ divorce and her mother’s subsequent pathological bitterness towards her, then details her formative years, in which she lived with her family like vagabonds as her mother went through a variety of losers and liars. At one point she runs away, letting the reader know up front that she has boundaries to her pain that won’t be crossed:
I was young and confused, so it was no surprise that a guy talked me into letting him dilute some heroine with water so he could shoot me up and turn me on. Before he pulled the rubber tourniquet from my arm I felt the magic wash through me and fell back on a mattress.
Heroin junkies might look dead on the outside, but inside it’s heaven. Inside it’s the absence of everything bad. It’s beautiful and perfect, and when you’re inside, the last thing you think about is dying because you want that perfect moment to last forever.
But perfection is an illusion. Perfection has a price.
During those perfect moments while I was tethered to the bed by drugs, bad things happened to me. Very bad things that I will never talk about.
Within moments of leaving the junkie house, she caught a motorcycle ride with the wrong man, riding “across town to the desert where more bad things happened,” before swiping a pack of razors to kill herself, then changing her mind and deciding to live.
All of this occurs in a scant few pages, and though Weir doesn’t share the no-doubt awful details, readers will respect the boundaries she set because of the intimacy her writing engenders. As foreign as her life is in comparison to most of us, she makes it real and personal for the reader, encouraging empathy and understanding so that when she holds up a “private” sign, it’s not a cop out.
This part of the narrative is more than mid-way into The Orchard which gives you an idea of how she moves back and forth in time. The book revolves around her marriage to apple farmer Adrian Curtis, a handsome, artistic man who allows his parents to rule his, and therefore their, lives. Curtis remains enigmatic throughout their marriage. The reader never understands him because Weir never fully does. It’s not a literary device, and that realization lends the book a layer of melancholy.
Shortly after their marriage, Weir realizes her husband continues to eat dinner at his parents’ house rather than with her. Her justifiable outrage makes no sense to him when she confronts him:
You still eat supper with your parents. I saw you.
Anybody else would have been embarrassed at being caught. He acted as if the whole arrangement was perfectly normal. “That’s what people do on a farm. They eat together and talk about the day. And I don’t like the food you cook."
In a later scene, he draws a lovely picture of her and she suggests framing it to hang. For him, though, art is something you leave in a drawer, which is why her becoming a novelist was something he could not understand. When, after three years of diligent writing she receives an offer from a publishing house, there is “no celebration of my sale, no wine or champagne or dinner. Adrian was skeptical of the contract, and even when a box of paperbacks arrived, he was unimpressed. Adrian was an artist, yet he could never fully embrace art. Art for him was a secret thing, a shameful thing, done in privacy.”
Even with this barrier of understanding between them, they raise loving children and are, for want of a better word, “happy” in their marriage. And yet her mother-in-law continues to despise her for being “white trash” and her father-in-law is so taciturn with her that, years into their marriage she can count on two hands the number of sentences he’d ever uttered to her. As she begins her memoirs with an “urban legend” about a young girl who drinks pesticides to illustrate their safety to her father’s customers, it’s clear where the story is going, and by the time it gets there, it’s devastating to read. And all along the way there are additional devastations with which to contend, including her grandmother’s death, followed immediately by the gruesome death of a horse Adrian bought to console her for her grandmother’s loss. It’s piled on, but it’s real, and Weir broadcasts her pain effectively.
When I finished the book I tried to describe it to my husband. He asked why I chose to read such sadness and failed to understand that Weir’s writing kept me turning the pages, even when every description of pesticides heralded a death knell. Theresa Weir’s perils were real, she and her children survived them, and the manner in which she examines and presents her life story is worth reading.
For more about this book, visit annefrasier.com.
Laurie Gold cannot stop reading and writing about romance—she’s been blabbing online for years. She remains a work in progress. Be one of the few who visits her at Toe in the Water or follow her may-be-too-political-for-you tweets at @laurie_gold.
