by Brianna Avenia-Tapper

In her debut memoir Flood, Christine Kalafus charts rough waters: her husband’s affair, the arrival of her twin boys, her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. On this deluge (heavy enough to drown a weaker protagonist), Kalafus floats memories of her childhood, her experiences buying and maintaining an old house, and small rafts of magical realism. She writes, “betrayal inside the body and betrayal outside the body means vacating the body. It means taking up residency in your imagination… in the magical.” Appropriately, the text Kalafus has created from her comorbid catastrophes is distinguished by a magical fluidity and filled with actual fluids: rain and sweat and barium, the Great Flood in 1955 when the overflowing Naugatuck River killed 87 people, syringes of bloody breast milk that look like “Strawberry Quik.”

I believe that reading a book should be enjoyable, or at least interesting. But often, it isn’t. So, whenever I read a book I like, I try to figure out: how did the writer get me to do the work of reading? That’s especially true for books like the buoyant Flood because the trick of propulsion is harder in stories not contained within the confines of a single genre, that jump around in time, that bring together a collage of wide-ranging material. It seems tricky not to lose your reader when you include everything from grueling ballet lessons and controlling rich people to difficulty breast-feeding, prednisolone-induced hallucinations and cut-glass doorknobs. Kalafus manages it with panache.

In part, Kalafus’s writing is compelling for its humor and restraint. Flood is a short and funny book. When she learns she is carrying twins, Kalafus thinks of a bumper sticker: “minivans are evidence that hell exists.” During cancer treatment  she reflects “all scans and no break makes Jane dissociate.” I laughed out loud when Kalafus described taking her wig off at a stoplight. She wrote: “Someone screams…in the car next to me…the man’s mouth is hanging open. The woman covers her mouth with her hands.” Red lights, Kalafus adds, became “the highlight of each day.”

Christine Kalafus

But Flood isn’t just funny. To some degree Kalafus uses the uncertainty and fear inherent in infidelity and illness to propel the reader forward. Of her marriage, she writes, “We were in a darkroom, our future a strip of undeveloped film.” Of her cancer, she writes, “When I was invaded from the inside, I had no protection at all.” But Kalafus resolves questions about her marriage early— we know she fights for her husband and wins. (She took him to Maine for hours of hotel sex in a snowstorm, and he broke off his affair.)  Similarly, while her life was threatened by the cancer, her death only feels like a true possibility for a page, which makes sense given that Flood is narrated by the mother of three young children. Kalafus didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in her own mortality, and she doesn’t let the reader stay there either. That’s not the primary force she uses to propel us through the story.

I didn’t read to the end of Flood because I was worried about Kalafus or her marriage. I wasn’t anxious about the possibility that she would lose. I read for the opposite reason: I knew Kalafus was strong and I wanted to see her triumph. I didn’t stop reading for the same reason that I’ve never yanked a blood transfusion out of my arm: I want that life-giving strength. The narrator’s claiming of her own strength is one of several arcs in Flood. In the beginning Kalafus writes, “I was raised to not only accept authority, but revere it.” Near the end she reflects, “whatever misgivings I once had about standing up for myself disappear—forever.” But the narrator of this story was never one to take any shit. As a child, when an adult man bothered her, she wrote ‘YOU SMELL’ with crayons on the inside of a Sucrets tin so she could chuck it through the window of the guy’s car. When her husband confesses to his affair, she asks, “You don’t think you love me anymore?” and then answers her own question: “Bullshit.” During her cancer treatment, the doctor recommends that she have a port to ease the delivery of medication. She refuses, and when a fumbling nurse tells her, “this would be easier if you had a port,” the narrator snaps, “for you, not me,” and then requests a different nurse. When asked to drink a bottle of barium before a scan, Kalafus pours half of it down the drain. She is strong and stubborn from the first page to the last. There was never a doubt in my mind that the narrator of Flood would survive anything the universe decided to throw at her. That’s why I loved her, and that’s why I kept reading.