Gretty has more clutching at her than her mom's knapsacked ashes. Her legacy includes a web of stories: some from grandfathers who survived the Holocaust and some from parents who didn't. These stories are woven by living cultures and deadly traumas so much deeper and older. These stories continue to grow and tangle.
- Born deaf and on the spectrum, it's a challenge not to be eccentric.
- Knowing her parents didn't want her, it's a struggle not to surrender to sadness.
- Alive and full of fight, it's impossible NOT to be ferocious!
This odd novel is a clutch of stories, poems, songs, dramas, and prayers which "congeal" to query the value of the narratives we partially create and which partially create us.
Are we "really" the stories we tell ourselves we are?
Here are stories of Gretty's dad, an ENORMOUSLY inadequate man, and his bumbling efforts, shadowed by genocide and suicide, to parent his tempestuous daughter.
Here are stories of two grandfathers, forearms scarred with faded tattoos. Before he died, one strived with gentle strangeness to inoculate her from human evil, creating absurdly inappropriate "stories." The other fiercely refused either to tell tales or conceal secrets, but nevertheless was the center of all manner of unsettling rumors and questions. Prior to language or even cognition, little Streamly Gredible is burdened with her own inborn knowledge of what ached all her adults.
She is her own type of disturbance, and WE ARE THE BIG BANG!
"Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass" is a comic agitation and an open-ended agony about the consequence of bringing any new being into our streaming rush of existence with all its ferocious push and accelerating forces. And, given her multiple legacies from many progenitors, this child is rigidly constituted to accept neither victimhood nor passivity.
We are "created" only to create in ever-expanding dimensions.
https: //www.streamlygredible.com/