The Nonlinearity of Remembrance: Review of Sydney Hegele's Bird Suit
Sydney Hegele, Bird Suit.
Invisible Publishing, 2024. $23.95 CAD.
Order a copy from Invisible Publishing./bird-suit/
When I read Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele, I’m reminded of how Toni Morrison traverses narrative threads in a community in The Bluest Eye. Morrison investigates the narrative of what led to Pecola Breedlove’s assault and her community failing her by searching through time, history, bystanders, neighbours, and family. Remembering and making sense of horrors isn’t easy work but, Morrison resolutely sets down the perspectives of this town’s history to piece together and create a memory for readers to hold. I see similarities in Bird Suit: pieces come together out of order and work off fragments to eventually render a tangible narrative for readers to process.
The prologue births the story like a complicated pregnancy: “Nine months after tourist season, the Port Peter girls give birth in bar bathrooms and school smoking pits and on ripped floral couches in their father’s apartments…They go to the cliffside lookout off Country Road Five, where there is a white plastic laundry basket with a pink fitted sheet inside. This is where the Port Peter girls leave their babies for the Birds” (6). The Birds are mysterious creatures, seemingly half bird, half girl, with each generation adding more mythos to the Birds. The story begins with displacement and legends before tackling intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, individuality, queer joy, and much more.
Stories are often an amalgamation of perspectives and a person’s unique connection to them, resulting from all the stories they’ve lived; Bird Suit navigates multiple perspectives and multiple stories, slowly stitching together a central story that many people hold a piece of. Georgia is a main voice, but each speaker is a protagonist in their own right—through their own individual but interconnected story. We hear from a young woman having sex with a married couple, a young man reconciling his faith with the constant abuse from his dad, a woman who yearns for home but cannot leave her son alone with her abusive husband, a man who goes from hunting Birds to falling for one, and a mother searching for her daughter. The characters become archaeologists, sifting through fractured memories, and dusting them off to see how they’ve transformed. Like how the narrative bends through time, so too do its characters’ memories; their fallibility reveals itself in the nonlinearity of the story. Each person’s perspective layers on top of each other, blending together and creating an inextricable bind.
One throughline the book achieves well is differentiating discretion from deliberately turning away from something. There are moments where abuse is happening right under peoples’ noses, but no one cares to look. The narrative exposes the township: “It didn’t matter that Isaiah had grown up with these people, that he saw them four days a week for twenty years, because when he needed them most, they valued their comfort over his safety” (91). This places blame and orients this story within society, where domestic violence is all too common and frequently dismissed. In the story, the abuse is also skimmed over in most parts, as though shamefully averting its narrative eye. Sometimes it is named, while other times it is merely alluded to, and other times, it is talked about as if it were a ritual: “Blood in Isaiah’s mouth: drink this and be thankful” (37). The unholy way in which Isaiah is meant to bear the cross of his abuse is almost pious in his undying love for his father, despite the suffering he endures at his hand.
This is Hegele’s biggest triumph in Bird Suit: readers delight in painfully complex characters that are broken in every humanly way. The characters’ conflicts are so ordinary and day-to-day, and they’re written about without sensationalizing them or downplaying them. Georgia, in her early twenties, charmed by a married man and seduced into his marriage, bends to a situation that has her doubting herself: “It wasn’t too late to back out. She could’ve said that she’d changed her mind. But by then, she felt like she deserved to do something that she didn’t want to do as a punishment for misunderstanding her own desires. She should’ve known earlier. She should’ve known all along” (77). Hegele is so good at voicing ordinary, overlooked issues that people struggle with daily and putting those confusing things into clear, concrete words. Hegele’s characters are mimetic and reflect the best and worst of us back onto our own eyes.
The style of Hegele’s writing is riveting and yanks readers along on its siren song rhythm. The story switches between short, choppy sentences and long run-on sentences that leave readers breathless:
“Isaiah is a player in a perpetual game that he never agreed to play. The game involves paying close attention to his father’s tone of voice and how hard he picks up objects and how hard he places those objects back down and how he flexes his fingers, and watching for any potential triggers to his father’s anger like mugs left unwashed or music set too loud or music set too quiet or the TV remote in the wrong place, and anticipating other triggers that he’s unable to control like the time of day and time of year and time of pay cycle and weather and whether it is a holiday, and the game is exhausting and Isaiah Abel Bloom is not meant to win” (34).
This style is reminiscent of the nonlinearity of memory by switching from gushing forth like a peach bursting open while other times our minds only give us fractured snippets of events.
Bird Suit makes readers question what it is to remember and be remembered. The story is nonlinear because memories are not straightforward. It can take years to allow one’s mind to go back to places, like Port Peter, and uncover what truly happened all those years ago. Much like Hegele’s previous collection The Pump, their work is not easily digestible but beckons readers to join in a community as it grieves and seeks to understand. I leave you with Bird Suit’s opening image: “The Port Peter peaches lure tourists, city folk from the southern side of Lake Ligeia. The Red Haven semi-freestones are fist big and full of nectar, with lightly fuzzed skin over firm, yellow flesh” (3). Hegele sets out with a seductive image of the perfect peach, meant to sink one’s teeth into—blissfully unaware of what poisons and nutrients lurk in its juices. Unlike the fallibility of memories, Bird Suit will stand solidly within people’s minds—a book you will joyfully return to like a complex childhood experience that you desperately want to make sense of and know you can only grow from meditating on.
Becca Lawlor is a reviewer and short story writer who is passionate about books. Their reviews can be found in literary journals like The Ampersand Review and CAROUSEL Magazine. In their fourth year of the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College, Becca is constantly honing their writing craft and reading most moments of the day when they aren’t studying or drinking lukewarm decaffeinated tea.