by Zara Houshmand
Stefany Anne Golberg’s My Morningless Mornings is one of the most unusual books I’ve ever encountered. It’s very quietly ambitious, framing its aspirations without obvious fanfare, and it accomplishes them with rare elegance and efficiency.
Ostensibly the book is a memoir, but just barely. Its narrative scaffolding consists of memories from a period of Golberg’s life when, as a young teenager, she kept a nightly vigil in her suburban Las Vegas home while her father descended into mental illness. The rest of her immediate family had jumped ship. Staying awake every night until dawn and then sleeping from dawn until noon, she evaded the morning—a time fraught with anxiety and the burdens of reality. The night time hours were filled with the drone of old films and documentaries on television and with stacks of library books and encyclopedias that fed her self-directed education.
That narrative scaffolding is constructed with exquisite finesse and reserve, without the faintest hint of melodrama. The things unsaid—the absences—are as powerful as what is revealed. Consider this passage:
From the window I could also see the evergreen trees that had been planted in front of my house when I was one year old. They had become sick and thin, following the rest of the backyard, making it easier for the sun to reach the anguished message my father had scrawled in giant block letters on the driveway earlier that spring.
What were they, the trees? Junipers, I think. They had round, pale fruits that tasted like rocks and were the color of a northern sea, the color of water Jules Verne must have sailed across in his little wooden skiff, the color of Jacques Cousteau’s eyes when he gazed across the bow, just before diving down deep. Maybe this is the fear we all share. That when the morning comes, and shines its light, we will have to read the message that has been put there before us. Or worse, that there will be so much sunlight and nothing at all to see.
That single image of the message written on the driveway is the totality of the story, one of a small handful of carefully placed details where the constant background tension of her father’s decline breaks through the surface. But in the voids created by that minimalist narrative, another world emerges. Here the mention of Jules Verne and Jacques Cousteau looks back to a passage earlier in the book, that launches from Cousteau’s late night television documentaries, and how Verne’s imaginary expeditions inspired his career, into the fathomless, sunless, undersea world as an expression of shadow work, and Verne’s fantastic vehicles as fully contained interior spaces where “a ship is a symbol for the perfection of one’s inner humanity.”
These chains of reflection crisscross through the book, weaving together themes of darkness and light, sleeping and waking, and the transitional regions of dawn’s twilight and the dream world. Read more »