“A brilliant, bracing and gut-wrenching memoir.”
“Ma’am, I’m following behind an ambulance that has your husband in the back.”
So opens SAYING IT OUT LOUD: A Widow’s Triumph over Tragedy, Amy King’s brilliant, bracing and gut-wrenching memoir recounting the year that followed the tragic death of her husband Andy in an army reserve training accident.
The subtitle kind of gives away where we’re headed, but that doesn’t detract at all from the power and emotional resonance of Amy’s blistering, blow-by-blow recapitulation of life raising their seventeen-month-old daughter alone after her entire life plan was upended. She was only twenty-seven when she answered the call that changed her life forever. Andy was twenty-eight.
The wonder of SAYING IT LOUD lies in how Amy makes us party to the day-to-day minutia of trying to cope with her new reality. Like trading the pot of coffee she and Andy shared every morning for a Keurig. Or filling in her new marital status on medical forms while explaining to nurses why she’s no longer on birth control. Or telling her daughter Adalyn “Da-da’s in the sky,” in answer to the toddler’s question about where her father was.
It makes us feel like a nosy neighbor peeking through the window, when the reality is Amy invited us in to her home and her life. Saying what she has to say out loud in a written scrapbook of memories collated into a message of hope and persistence to others who have suffered a grievous loss, and everyone else for that matter.
SAYING IT OUT LOUD is measured in moments more than pages, including the very one where she turned the recovery corner:
“Look, Mommy, Dada made me a sunset tonight.” I was used to her running to the door every time the bell rang, saying “Dada!” But saying that made me realize she had accepted the reality that defined my dark winter. And it made me think, Wow, if my toddler can see the light, then I can find my way out of the darkness.
Amy adjusts her coping mechanisms on the fly to climb out of the hole tragedy has plunged her into. We follow along as she displaces her grief into learning to make Andy a part of her life in a whole new way by honoring his memory with a scholarship fund and a memorial 5K race which birthed another of my favorite moments:
With all the hills, the course itself was like a roller coaster, a fitting metaphor for the past year. The hills of grief that got steeper and steeper, before finally leveling off, only to dip and rise again. The farther I ran, the more the hills lightened and the downhill stretches increased. Near the end, after the steepest hill of them all, the course flattened out entirely and I coasted the final stretch to the finish line. And, appropriately enough, we all followed spray-painted arrows with “AKK” for Anderson Keaton King, directing runners along the course, as if Andy was pointing them in the right direction.
Memoir doesn’t get any better than that. Amy King has fashioned a monumental masterpiece that tugs at the heart strings even as it touches the soul. SAYING IT OUT LOUD shines on every page, a book as inspiring and uplifting as it is raw and unflinching, leaving us to bask in the glow of its pitch-perfect storytelling.
