Spoilers ahead!
You can’t erase your past when there are pieces of it scattered inside other people. Long-lasting friendship necessarily has an unnerving underpinning because like any sustaining relationship, we’re vulnerable within them, and while vulnerability can be emancipatory in its way, it can also lend itself to insecurity and doubt. Rachel Harrison tackles female friendship in this way, incisively and with horrific aplomb, in her debut 2020 book, The Return.
As I’ve mentioned in other book reviews, I’m a sucker for a premise that takes a group of friends and sticks them in a remote setting with a slow-motion unfurling of dread and horror. That’s what Harrison does with college friends, Elise, Molly, Mae, and Julie. Julie, who reappeared mysteriously after a two-year disappearance where she was presumed dead — her husband, Tristan, held a memorial service for her on the one-year anniversary of said disappearance. But something is amiss, and it’s not the gaudy, ostentatiously-themed hotel the friends go to as way of reconnecting with each other, but specifically with Julie.
What’s marvelous about Harrison’s writing is that, as mentioned, the dread is a slow-motion unfurling, where the reader becomes the classic shouting bystander, “Get the heck out of there!” But also, the plot moves at a fast clip, nevertheless, because much of it moves through dialogue among the four friends, covering Julie’s disappearance and reappearance, and then the oddities occurring at the hotel and with Julie, who is eating meat (she was a vegetarian), stinks, has yellow teeth and is losing teeth, and left blood in Elise’s bathroom. Interspersed with the dialogue is a back-filling of character-building and the relationships therein between the four friends. Elise is the one who feels like her life and previous choices, such as sleeping with her college professor, sucks, and thus, is jealous of her other friends; Mae is the rich one who wants to pretend everything is fine in her life and among her friends; Molly is the strong-willed, overcompensating friend; and Julie, who wanted to be rich and famous, inexplicably settled down and married Tristan, a blue collar worker (who leaves candy bar wrappers in the sink (divorce him!!!). Even among friends, it’s hard to have hard conversations, particularly about what happened with Julie, who claims to not remember anything about her two-year disappearance and the doctors cleared her (weird).
More than being a nuanced story about the complexities of friendships, Harrison’s book also reads as an allegory about grief, and I interpret it in two forms. First, is the grief at losing a friend, Julie, and trying to move on. While what occurs in the book is that Julie was subsumed by some entity in the Acadia National Park in Maine, I think the metaphor is that she’s walking death. She’s quite literally falling apart, with Harrison describing her skin as melting around her bones, the dirty hair, the smell, the teeth falling out, and so on. Harrison’s descriptions of Julie alone added to the dreadfulness building up in the book. Julie came back, she later claims, because of Elise, who never lost hope (or was in denial), presuming Julie was still alive somewhere. Second, is the grief at losing a friend without a death, which is to say, the grief we feel when long-time friends stop being so close, and not just in a geographical sense. As we grow older and our lives change, our friendships change, even the long-term ones, and within that is grief of a kind. Growing older is to necessarily grow to accept the presence of such grief. All of them are doing that, but particularly Elise, who Harrison tells the story through. In addition to being envious of her friends, she feels like they’ve abandoned her and essentially, have moved on without her.
But I think by the end of the book, and after the supernatural ordeal with Julie, Elise understands that living in and of itself is a gift — the little ways life reverberates around us to let us know we’re alive, like warm socks from the dryer or the foam of a latte, as Elise’s examples — and that while it’s always changing, ending is worse than changing.
Heck of a debut from Harrison, and I look forward to reading more of her work, and it looks like she’s somehow written four books in the four years since her debut book, so, there we go.
Milam's Musings 