g Vanishin

It's the second time that I will have read this book, having underappreciated it the first time.  I find that there are some books which takes a while to lovingly thwack you in the face, sometimes waiting for a precise moment in your life to do it.  And, having done that, these books stay with you for a long, long time.

Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis is very aptly titled, and leaves you with a  slightly haunted feeling of having lost something solid of yourself in its pages.  You feel you are all of the characters inside these stories, while denying that same confession to the world, lest you lose more.  Among other things, the book speaks of a writer whose vanishing from his blameless family becomes, inexplicably, the cleverest thing he ever did.  A city girl who will no longer sleep over her only friend's house after, again quite inexplicably, sleeping with her aging cowboy of a father.  A recent widower whose life, and that of his aquarium, slowly vanishes when he finds a failed magician working the gambling tables he, again quite inexplicably, slowly loses himself in.  A woman who, for her entire life has been drawn into marriage proposals, seem to know nothing else while unknowingly escaping a marriage.  A set of three roommates who, inexplicably, work out perfectly the way they do, even after one vanishes and returns, again inexplicably.  A family straight out of a Wes Anderson film whose lives are all inexplicable.  All the inexplicables resonate with something inside you - perhaps the part of you that vanishes every night, and becomes reconstructed from always already faulty memory every morning.