Perish
A Novel
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4.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Watkins’s prose is effortless and forthright. . . . This is an impressive feat of storytelling. . . . It’s a difficult read and a tender story of silences and secrets. It’s a novel about coming home, despite that home being broken. And it’s a brave triumph of a novel that readers won’t forget long after finishing it.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Good Morning America * Essence* Esquire * The Root * Bustle * Ebony * PopSugar * Ms. * The Millions
From a stunning new voice comes a powerful debut novel, Perish, about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intergenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed.
Bear it or perish yourself. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateteful night in her cousin’s outhouse that change the trajectory of her life.
Spanning decades, Perish tracks the choices Helen Jean—the matriarch of the Turner family—makes and the way those choices have rippled across generations, from her children to her grandchildren and beyond.
Told in alternating chapters, Perish follows four members of the Turner family: Julie B., a woman who regrets her wasted youth and the time spent under Helen Jean’s thumb; Alex, a police officer grappling with a dark and twisted past; Jan, a mother of two who yearns to go to school and leave Jerusalem, Texas, and all of its trauma behind for good; and Lydia, a woman whose marriage is falling apart because her body can’t seem to stay pregnant, as they're called home to say goodbye to their mother and grandmother.
This family’s “reunion” unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
Set in vividly drawn Texas and tackling themes like trauma, legacy, faith, home, class, race, and more, this beautiful yet heart-wrenching novel will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of family and the ways bonds can be made, maintained, or irrevocably broken.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this devastating and gut-wrenching debut, Watkins explores the generational trauma and violence endured by a Black Texas family. The story begins in the 1950s with 16-year-old Helen Jean, who becomes pregnant after the death of her beloved mother. It's not the first time; Helen Jean's cousin Ernestine, knowledgeable in abortifacient home remedies, has aided her before. But now, despite hints that she may have been impregnated by a family member and not the lover she eventually marries, Helen Jean hears an inner voice, "a mouth inside her trying to crawl its way out," beseeching her to "bear it or perish yourself." She goes on to have four children: Wayne, victimized by his uncle and isolated in a ramshackle shed by his mother; Julie B., who learns to survive by taking advantage of her mother's cash and benefits; Ruby Nell, who, after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Wayne and his friends, devolves with crushing mental health issues; and Marie, intellectually challenged and virtually ignored by her mother. Watkins demonstrates a mastery of alternating points of view, including those of Julie B.; Ruby Nell's daughter, Lydia, who has recurring miscarriages; Julie B's daughter, Jan, who contends with unhealed trauma; and her son Alex, who suffers from excruciating PTSD and the most extreme manifestations of years of childhood trauma. Evocative language ("this place where the past is a constant haunting") tellingly illuminates the harm done to each of the family members, as they find some redemption in disclosing family secrets at Helen Jean's deathbed. With grace and aplomb, Watkins electrifies and shatters.
