Ponder Post: Fire Season

Fire Season by Hollye Dexter is the story of family's journey back to solvency and security. Due to an undetected electric fire within the walls of their home, Hollye and her family lost all their material possessions –  their home and personal belongings, their pets, her billing and customer records and all stock from her children's clothing business, and her husband's equipment and instruments crucial to his job as a professional musician. The house burned completely down to the foundation, nothing remaining but rubble dotted with a few scattered scorched items. They escaped their totally destroyed home with moderately severe physical injuries but those injuries healed. The mental healing was another challenge, however.

Imagine losing everything, living in borrowed clothes, having no IDs to replace ones lost in the fire, and lacking a livelihood and therefore credit – truly starting again from nothing.  They were uninsured. They needed to swallow their pride and rely on charity. Feelings of loss often guiltily overshadowed feelings of gratitude, but society and politeness requires saying "thank you" none the less. Many of these conflicting emotions were well portrayed in the memoir.

The situation was indeed dire and I can be very sympathetic for the family. Fire Season got a 5 star review on Amazon from 93% of its readers but I am not of the same opinion. The subtitle of this novel is My Journey from Ruin to Redemption, and I think the author presented an imbalanced focus on "ruin" rather than "redemption". The book could not seem to choose among being a retrospective on a hippie lifestyle and unhappy childhood, a litany of optimistic but nevertheless poor decisions, a psychological analysis, or a religious revelation. At the risk of appearing cold-hearted, I will admit I thought it was repetitious. It spent too much time focusing on bad luck Hollye and her husband had experienced, before as well as after the fire, rather than on a victorious triumph over the odds. The frank detailing of hopelessness and disheartening thoughts was a brave expression of truth, but I felt the book dwelled too long on this aspect at the expense of revealing that there was indeed a light at the end of the tunnel.

This was not an enjoyable read for me. The emotional baggage the author carried with her, even before the fire, complicated her recovery from the disaster. The novel might resonate with others confronted with such a devastating loss, acknowledging the despair and struggles they would most certainly face; however, the tale and its telling would not be uplifting to the unfortunate. It would fail to give them the hope and encouragement they would crave to get back on their feet, eventually. My redeeming consolation in having spent time reading Fire Season was that perhaps my purchase of this depressing book contributed to its royalties and helped the family a bit financially.