LIVING DONORS
“I am armed with the past, and the will, and a brick.”
- Scott Hutchison
(and the French Resistance)
Zadie and her parents are struggling to piece it together. Even as a little girl, Zadie is building a dictionary to make sense of the world. Her father Lyle is trying to remember the last time he genuinely enjoyed a meal. And her mother Debbi wishes she could reach back, to a time before she gazed into a mirrored garden ball and it shattered.
Living Donors traces interlocking stories through three generations as they try, fail, and cross over their own boundaries in attempt to turn life’s poison into medicine. Weaving through a nomadic childhood across the American West, Zadie’s bright inner world is her one constant, enabling her survival. Despite neglect from her magnetic but damaged mother, and jealousy from her frosty new-age stepmother, Zadie navigates the chaotic channels towards adulthood in a style all her own. She learns when to break allegiances and seek surrogate nurturing from any source available. With help from her father and friends, ancient stories from relatives, and her own clever imagination, Zadie takes the disparate pieces and stitches together a sense of home in the world among families who adopt her as their own. But the cost is high. Loyalty to her own vision for her life will put her in direct conflict with her family’s past. The limits of Zadie’s desire to be loved are put to a life-or-death test when Debbi’s years of alcohol abuse land her in the hospital with stage IV liver cirrhosis. Zadie faces a choice: pay her pound of flesh, or walk away and secure a tenuous freedom in the universal struggle of generations to define themselves in contrast to their parents' waning generation.
A novel of loyalty, violence, and transference, Living Donors weighs the aspiration of youth against the souring of that hope into shame, spite, or worse-- resignation. It is an exploration of the ways we carry each other's pain and the hard-won hope that through this gift, we can be made whole.
