Dawn Raffel
The Secret Life of Objects
About The Author
Dawn Raffel is the author of two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her fiction has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Quarterly, NOON, and many others. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, and at Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal, Canada, and St. Petersburg, Russia. She is an editor at large for Reader’s Digest and the editor of The Literarian, the online journal for the Center for Fiction in New York City.
Praise for Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects
“‘Sometimes things shatter,’ Dawn Raffel writes in The Secret Life of Objects. ‘More often they just fade.’ But in this evocative memoir, moments from the past do not fade — they breathe on the page, rendering a striking portrait of a woman through her connections to the people she’s loved, the places she been, what’s been lost, and what remains. In clear, beautiful prose, Raffel reveals the haunting qualities of the objects we gather, as well as the sustaining and elusive nature of memory itself.”
— Samuel Ligon, author of Drift and Swerve: Stories
“Dawn Raffel puts memories, people and secrets together like perfectly set gems in these shimmering stories, which are a delight to read. Every detail is exquisite, every character beautifully observed, and every object becomes sacred in her kind, capable hands. I savored every word.
— Priscilla Warner, author of Learning to Breathe — My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life
Praise for Dawn Raffel’s Earlier Writing
Vanity Fair
“The stories in Dawn Raffel’s astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) are as sharp and bright as stars.”
— Elissa Schappell
Time Out New York
“Her prose is intense enough to make even everyday topics seem fire-hot.”
The Daily Beast (5 Must-Read Story Collections)
“The 21 stories in Raffel’s slim second collection…reflect the disconnects, interruptions, and riddles in a contemporary woman’s hectic life…. The final story, ‘Beyond All Blessing and Song, Praise and Consolation,’ titled for a line in the mourner’s Kaddish, distills sadness into an ending both poetic and pure.”
— Jane Ciabattari
O, The Oprah Magazine
“Sharp, spare stories about women at, or approaching, the end of their ropes.”
— Sara Nelson
More Magazine
“Highly imaginative stories filled with sly wit…”
— Carmela Ciuraru
Publishers Weekly
“Raffel’s stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace.”
Booklist
“These reflective, well-tempered fictions are bursting with energy, requiring readers to look more closely at the world around them.”
— Jonathan Fullmer
New Pages
“Reality may be an adventure in Raffel’s cleverly and artfully crafted new collection, and as she writes it, is always an adventure worth taking.”
— Sara Rauch
American Book Review
“The emphasis here must be on Raffel’s new contribution, worth celebrating whatever its category.”
— John Domini
The Secret Life of Objects
For Brendan and Sean
~ ~ ~
The following chapters were previous published as follows:
“The Tea Set from Japan,” “The Prayer Book,” “The Bride’s Bible,” “The Teacup,” “The Florsheim Dog,” “Tranqil Ease,” and “Garnet Earrings” in Willow Springs
“The Lady on the Vase,” “The Lock,” “The Thing with Wings,” “My Grandmother’s Recipes,” and “The Dress” in The Brooklyn Rail
“The Rocking Chair,” “The Glass Angel,” “The Rug,” and “The Mirror” in The Milan Review
“The Sewing Box” and “Rascal” in Salt Hill
“The Mug” in Unsaid
“The Cat” in Moonshot
“Yosemite and the Range of Light” in Everyday Genius
“The Watch” in The Collagist
“Medals” (under the title “As-Is”) in Wigleaf
“The Nesting Bowls” (under the title “Hungary”) in The Lifted Brow (Australia)
“The Moonstone Ring” in Numéro Cinq
The Secret Life of Objects
The mug came first: a clay-based receptacle for stimulant, for memory, for story, for tonic for aloneness.
Surveying my house I found myself surrounded by surfaces and vessels, by paper and glass, by cloth, wood, clay, paint, and also my late artist mother’s renditions of things.
Already the contents are shifting shape. Already I cannot recall a voice, a year, the way the light fell speckled in a room.
Objects are intractable. We own them. We don’t.
All memoir is fiction.
We try to fit the pieces together again.
The Mug
Every morning I drink coffee out of a mug that I took from my mother’s house. It is a blue mug from the Milwaukee Art Museum where my mother was a docent during the last years of her life. The image is of a Picasso, a bird.
My mother’s death was sudden. It was my stepfather who’d been dying, of stomach cancer, and who’d begun home hospice care. My mother, who’d been despondent (“I was supposed to die first,” she told me. “This was not supposed to happen.”), did not wake up one morning. The house was left in the way a house is left when someone leaves the world mid-thought. Nothing had been sorted or dispensed with or hidden, and after my stepfather died too, it fell to me to see to the house’s contents.
My mother had saved everything. This was the good news and also the bad news. Because she had been an artist, her house was filled with dozens upon dozens of sculptures, in clay and in wood, paintings and drawings, in oil, in acrylic, in charcoal, in pencil, of water and trees and women — so many women from so many angles, clothed, nude; their faces, their bodies, the suggestion of the inner life. Roses abounded. Shells, too, the pinkened insides of conches like portals to dreams. My sister and I could not take them all, and I didn’t want them to sit in storage for 20 or 30 years until someone else threw them out. I found a taker for everything except the drawings, wisps of thought, which I tossed, reluctantly. My mother’s favorite bench by the lake, the place where she went to cry after my father left, rendered in woodblock, went to a cousin; waters and skies to another cousin, to aunts and stepsiblings and in-laws and friends. I took home the roses she painted when she was young, and the sculpted likeness of the woman who was me, and the heads of women darkened with patina, the red clay torsos, the Renoir copy that had hung over the sofa, that my children wanted. I took the bronze dancer, a copy of a Degas we had seen the last time my mother had led my children and me through the museum, four months before she died.