A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
The Orange County Register, A New Spring Book You Won't Want to Miss
Bookshop, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
"[Brownrigg's] tale is an absolute banger . . . What I love about this memoir is how ably it gets at something very complicated indeed: the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die. It’s dreadfully sad, and yet through Brownrigg’s sleuthing, something touching is redeemed." —Emma Brockes, The New York Times Book Review
"A legacy of absent fathers haunts Berkeley author Sylvia Brownrigg, who traces the story of her father, who lived off the grid in Northern California, as well as her grandfather’s far-flung, colorful life, in this probing memoir." —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle
"Brownrigg’s new memoir, The Whole Staggering Mystery, weaves together the stories of these two missing fathers, tackling issues of sexuality and silences and childhoods fractured by divorce." —Joanne Furio, Berkeleyside
"Through her evocative storytelling, Brownrigg juggles the essence of reinvention and the longing for self-discovery." —California Sun
"In this engrossing, surprising book, Sylvia brings together one of the great pleasures of memoir—giving us a deeply thought-out version of real-life people and events—and one of the great pleasures of fiction—allowing us to sink deeply into other lives." —Sarah Stone, Necessary Fiction
"Engrossing . . . Brownrigg’s skillful interweaving of slippery narrative threads adds up to an immersive reading experience." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brownrigg delves into the facts and fictions that shaped her family for generations, weaving the newly discovered revelations with the copious correspondence her father kept up during his lifetime and her own evolving understanding of her father. The result will especially resonate with those whose own family histories contain secrets." —Laurie Unger Skinner, Booklist
"Sylvia Brownrigg’s wise, intimate, and deliciously entertaining memoir delves into that great mystery we call family and, in particular, fathers—the ones we come in with and those we acquire. This book affirms that while you can’t pick your ancestors or the secrets they harbor, a writer with a keen eye and open heart can have the last word." ––Carol Edgarian, author of Vera
"Brownrigg takes us on an alluring and absorbing voyage through the roiling generations of her family as she pursues the central mystery of her paternal grandfather—in death and life—and its ramifications for her father and herself. A deft and engaging storyteller, she navigates four continents' worth of secrets, silences, and absences in scenes fleshed out with warmth, wit, and vivid immediacy. The story that unfurls invites us to explore the fierce power of parental and filial love that, by its relative presence or absence, reaches across eras of history and lives." ––Leta McCollough Seletzky, author of The Kneeling Man
"The Whole Staggering Mystery is a remarkable achievement. Spanning decades and continents, yet psychologically intimate and precise, bringing to vivid life the unforgettable characters that people Sylvia Brownrigg's family, this haunting book offers at once the satisfaction of memoir and the revelations of fiction." ––Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs
"The Whole Staggering Mystery is just that: at its heart is the secret of Brownrigg’s particular family—which takes us from Northern California to New Mexico, to England, Asia and East Africa, from the 1810s to the 1930s to the 1960s straight through to today. But there is also the universal tangle of fathers and sons, dads and daughters: the possibility and impossibility we all feel of knowing and understanding and healing our pasts, of making peace with those who have gone before, or at least making peace with ourselves. Brownrigg tells it all in prose that is gorgeous and wry, slipping seamlessly between the real and the imagined, layering stories—which, in the end, are all we have—upon stories, to arrive at something that feels deeply, urgently true." —Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter
"With its colorful and eccentric characters, Sylvia Brownrigg's book reads like a Graham Greene novel—her father Nick and grandfather Gawen were peers of the realm. Like others of that adventuring class, these are men so widely traveled as to remain mysterious to their children, cloaked from intimate knowledge by lapses too in generational time.
As our luck provides, however, each man was a writer, making Brownrigg's memoir a voyage of literary discovery in which we're taken from posh 1930s London to Nairobi during the last days of Empire to the counterculture wilds of off-the-grid Northern California. Each a changeling, each leaving clues to his true and soulful reality in published and unpublished work—their letters, novels—fascinating men who come tantalizingly close before vanishing, as in the best of thrillers, into mystery." ––Jane Vandenburgh, author of A Pocket History of Sex in the 20th Century: A Memoir
★ 2024-02-01
A lyrical memoir/reimagining of a family scattered among colonial Kenya, wartime England, and the California redwoods over the past century.
One day in 2012, novelist Brownrigg received a box in the mail containing letters, sepia portraits, information about the birth of her father, Nick, and a typed account about the short life of her English grandfather, Gawen, who was also a novelist. This treasure trove helped Brownrigg to not only uncover the mystery of these two men—Gawen died in his late 20s, and Nick left the family when Brownrigg was a baby (“his early absence left a constant hollowness in me”)—but also learn her family history and her place in it. Told in four parts, the engrossing text moves back and forth in time, from the English countryside in the early 1930s to the redwoods of Northern California in the 1970s, back to Kenya in the fading days of the British Empire, forward to London during World War II, and finally to the present in California. Though this is a memoir, Brownrigg executes an impressive reconstruction of history. In one chapter, we experience the viewpoint of Gawen’s supervisor in Kenya; in another, we follow Nick’s dead brother; yet another imagines the life of Beatrice, Brownrigg’s great-grandmother, living alone in London during wartime, after the deaths of her son, Gawen, and her husband. Boldly, the author also writes about herself and her family as if they were characters in a novel. “Getting at Nick…required me to blur him into Frank, and myself to Sophie….The move simultaneously provided distance and proximity: I could see my child self at arm’s length but the parent from closer to, like a perspective-altering telescope.”
Brownrigg’s skillful interweaving of slippery narrative threads adds up to an immersive reading experience.
