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Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou is Everywhere, is a less than glamorous coming-of-age story about what it means to be an outsider in one’s own body. The novel, set in a quiet town in southwestern Pennsylvania, is told from the perspective of fourteen-year-old Cindy Stoat. Cindy’s mother often disappears for months at a time, leaving Cindy and her two older brothers to fend for themselves. After the departure of their mother, Cindy and her brothers become “basically feral”, living without clean water or electricity, mowing lawns to make some spare cash that usually gets spent on booze. Cindy’s life is composed of long days watching television, skipping school, and thwarting unwanted sexual advances from her brother Clinton. There is a pervading sense of loneliness and fatigue in these early chapters, or as Cindy describes, “My life was an empty place, from where I stood, it seared on with a blank and merciless light. All dust and no song.” Thus, when a local girl named Jude Vanderjohn disappears, Cindy becomes obsessed with Jude and her “escape” from the suffering of daily life. Cindy explains, “I wanted all the hidden hearts to search for me. I wanted to sparkle in the vast outline of the gone, because the gone took up the whole sky and air… Gone was a place where nobody could touch you. Like a heaven, or that’s what I thought.” Jude, the sometimes girlfriend of Cindy’s older brother Virgil, is wealthier and more well-liked than Cindy, making her a perfect projection of Cindy’s fantasies. Jude is also biracial, and the only non-white girl in town, which is an important component of her romanticized uniqueness for Cindy.
After Jude’s disappearance, Cindy’s brother Virgil begins spending time at Jude’s home, caring for Jude’s single mother, Bernadette, who has completely unwound. Bernadette is a raging alcoholic with a brain condition that has slowed her mental faculties, and has taken to filling her home with expensive oddities and infomercial products. When Cindy tags along with Virgil one day to help clean the house, Bernadette mistakes Cindy for her missing daughter, and Cindy falls into a charade that will come to transform the arc of her youth. Cindy decides to continue encouraging Bernadette’s delusions, living with Bernadette and pretending to be her daughter, Jude. Cindy suspects that Bernadette is not actually fooled by her simple ruse, but the two of them fall into a convenient routine that allows Cindy to escape her troubling home life, and Bernadette to escape the reality of her daughter’s disappearance. Cindy says, “I believed she mistook me for her daughter, in some way. I stood in the place where Jude was supposed to be, at least. And this, I thought, was a kindness.” Cindy is increasingly comfortable in this half existence, and it becomes a method for Cindy to escape her situation and herself.
However, this all changes when Bernadette gets a call from the real Jude, who describes her kidnapping and the exact location that she is being held at. Bernadette, in a drunken stupor, doesn’t believe that this is the real Jude on the phone, and Cindy overhears the call but chooses not to take action. Meanwhile, Cindy’s brother Virgil is being held in jail, as he is suspected in Jude’s kidnapping due to recently found evidence. Cindy now has information that would liberate Jude from her kidnapper and free Virgil from jail, and she begins to concern herself with the precariousness of her position. Immediately after the call, Cindy reflects, “I never intended to keep this information to myself. I didn’t have some kind of plan. Like most evil, I suppose, mine was only a hurt hiding in whatever materials were near. My hurt had no imagination for other people. Other people, Jude, Bernadette, whoever, were about an inch deep at best, but I went on for miles.” The novel is in many ways about misunderstanding, and the inconsistencies between one’s appearance and inner life, which manifests itself often as a deficiency in compassion for others. It is a profound statement on how pain and suffering can isolate individuals, both from communion with one another and with their inner selves. When Cindy realizes how empty her life as Jude has become, and how much further Bernadette’s condition has deteriorated, she calls the police and informs them of Jude’s whereabouts.
Jude returns home to her mother in poor condition, and Cindy returns home to find that her own mother has returned with a newborn son. She finds that no one cared to alert her of her mother’s arrival, and Virgil has come home from prison with a nasty drug habit. She is once again a stranger in her own home, and finds that her disappearance has not provoked the sentiment of love and attention that she had hoped it would spark. Cindy’s story does attract the attention of People magazine, which runs a gossip piece about Cindy posing as Jude, painting her as some sort of deceptive criminal mastermind. The piece attracts plenty of public attention, and the school system compels Cindy to attend therapy sessions and return to the classroom the following year. Cindy describes her return to the school system, “The halls had a hectic, soupy feel I didn’t remember. My heart froze every time someone talked to me. I hadn’t talked to anyone my age all year. I forgot what you do. I felt like my words were made out of bones and hot dogs and nonsense. Maybe I could just do charades all year. I was trying to do the charades of INVISIBLE.”
This novel is not simply a coming-of-age narrative about teen angst, but a brutal portrait of what it means to be a young person whom society has discarded. Cindy cannot comprehend her selfhood because no one in her life has made room for it. The novel exhibits a staggering emotional intelligence, and withholds judgement of its characters who are struggling against many of the most difficult circumstances that life has to offer. It is about the cycle of abuse and how it must be transcended by connection. The novel never asks its readers to pity its characters, but rather to understand the circumstances that can wreak havoc on humanity. Smith weaves these larger questions of trauma and identity into a richly textured narrative that refuses to exploit the pain of its characters. Her prose is artful and arresting, a testament to the beautiful rewards of a life well-examined.