Little Avalanches
A Memoir
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A daughter’s quest for truth. A soldier’s fight for survival. Their shared search for understanding.
Little Avalanches is a gorgeously written memoir of breathtaking scope that propels readers from the beaches of California in the early ‘70s to the battlefields of World War II.
As a young girl, Becky is forced to hide from phantom Nazis, subjected to dental procedures without pain medication, and torn from her mother again and again. Growing up in the shadow of her father’s PTSD, she wants to know what is wrong but knows not to ask.
Her father won’t talk about being a Timberwolf, a unit of specially trained night fighters that went into combat first and experienced a 300 percent casualty rate. He returns home with thirteen medals, including a Silver Star, and becomes a doctor and well-respected member of the community, but is haunted by his past.
Seeing only his explosive and often dangerous personality, Becky distances herself from the man she wants to love. Yet on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, when Becky looks at the vulnerable man he’s become, something shifts, and she asks about the war. He breaks seventy years of silence, offering an unfiltered account of war without glory and revealing the extent of the trauma he’s endured. She spends the next several years interviewing, researching, and ultimately understanding the demons she inherited.
Because his story is incomplete without hers, and hers is inconceivable without his, Ellis offers both, as well as their year-long aching conversation marked by moments of redeeming grace. With compassionate, unflinching writing, Little Avalanches reminds us that we are profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellis debuts with a bracing exploration of intergenerational trauma and the power of honest dialogue to defang it. After 170 days of hellish combat as an Allied soldier in 1944 Germany, Ellis's father returned home to the United States with hero's honors and debilitating PTSD. She sandwiches a visceral account of his military experience between chapters about its destructive effects on her childhood and other sections that illuminate how, decades later, she and her father repaired their relationship as "one story at a time, he revealed himself to me." Ellis's childhood was marked by her father's unpredictable moods and rages. He was determined to make Ellis and her brother "tough, driven, and compliant" by exposing them to danger; in one particularly harrowing episode, he forces Ellis to have six cavities filled without anesthesia. When he reached old age and his health declined, she inquired, for the first time, about his war service, prompting him to open up and allowing them to connect at last. Ellis expertly balances pain with compassion as she plunges into the depths of her father's PTSD armed with frank and flinty prose. It's a radiant and healing account.