Synopsis
HERE LIES MEMORY explores the place of memory in living, daily, scarred and sacred lives. Two Pittsburgh families struggle to survive trauma and love. A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face directly. This novel explores what language and photographs do to memory, desire, and love, and what gentrification is doing to the souls of families and neighborhoods.
Review
How does memory write us? What fictions haunt our bodies and lives, and what truths do we construct to carry the weight of our selves? Doug Rice designs a brutally beautiful helix from dual narratives woven by and through love and loss. Between blindness and insight there live characters who, like all of us, story a way to go on in the face of buildings decaying, cities disappearing, hearts and bodies slipping toward ghost. Mother, sister, wife, grandfather, grandson, girl, boy...all identities move through desire, love, memory, and language in a place called Pittsburgh. Reading this book made my skin sing, my heart wail, a secular hymn of the body. --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children
Covering all of the bases in this novel bent on conveying a deep love for the city and people of Pittsburgh, Doug Rice ultimately makes our lives feel more dignified, loved, no matter if our local language and essence of being have become displaced. I've got no words for what Rice accomplishes. Just that, he beautifully brings to light everything in The 'Burgh --and in places of the heart--that was done in the dark. ... In this book of urban dreamers, Doug Rice cooks up a proverbial storm, uprooting all kinds of emotions, including the terrible silence that goes with the territory. ... Here Lies Memory drudges up everything and their momma, making night terrors and the anti/reflective "mirrortalk" of frustrated cooped up characters richly front and center. I can't even think of Pittsburgh property now -- or any dialogue about it -- without this tell-it-like-it-is novel continuing to do major damage to not only my black-ish view of gentrification but also my psyche! ... Exploring the Pittsburgh cycle--the drama of perpetually dreaming of love and desperately searching for its essence that would make even Pulitzer Prize winning author August Wilson jealous, Rice holds nothing back, going all the way to the fences with this novel. -- Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of Straight Outta Compton
In Here Lies Memory, Doug Rice loves his characters wondrously, keenly, completely, and the result is at once stunningly beautiful, brilliant, fierce, crazily imaginative, and acutely wise about how the ghosts that our memories and words invent are often the last things to leave us, no matter what, how some stay so deep in our skin they become as real as its color--especially that can damage and mend us the most. -- Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting
Mr. Rice has accomplished something incredibly difficult and done so with superlative skill. He has made the surreal feel real, he has blurred the lines between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and he has somehow managed to contribute to the conversation of trauma and abuse in a manner that is not only unprecedented, but feels entirely necessary. Here Lies Memory is a fantastic work that will require multiple reads to fully process...--John Venegas, Angel City Review
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