Book Review: Wreck by Kelley Jo Burke

Wreck by author, playwright, and documentarian Kelley Jo Burke is a hilarious and honest exploration of family trauma, love, and memory.

Burke suffers from chronic anxiety which, she suggests, may have been passed down genetically through the matrilineal line. Whether her theory (which she back’s up with research) carries water or not, there is no question she is deeply connected to her relatives and to her oceanic roots. She writes about herself and about her family with brutal honesty and a lot of self-deprecating humour:

“I was sure even in grade two that I was a deep soul, the girl who ordered not burgers but Filet-o-Fish at McDonald’s because she was a rebel, a dreamy eyed, book-loving, meant-for-something-special free spirit… I also drank Dr. Pepper. ‘Nuff said” (p.62).

Burke’s own trauma begins at a very young age when she is ripped from her American home for cold, inhospitable Winnipeg, separated from her beloved grandmother and from the famous lighthouse she used to gaze at from her grandparents’ seaside cottage. Despite this severing, the author remains deeply connected to the lighthouse, to the cottage, and to her grandparents. They haunt her, you might say, particularly after her grandmother dies. Thus, the traumas metastasize, and so do Burke’s memories. 

What is uniquely brilliant about Wreck is the structure Burke employs over three chapters entitled Asking 1, 2, and 3. As the author works through her complicated relationship with her grandfather—a difficult man she feels responsible for, a man she may or may not love, a man whose actions caused great pain and grief—Burke becomes the unreliable narrator of her own life. Here, the author’s approach to writing memoir is dazzlingly creative, and perhaps a bit cathartic.

Wreck is about loss. How we carry loss in our bodies and minds, how loss can impact perspective. But it is also about love. How love remains despite the hurt, how love, if we let it, can heal, no matter how imperfect or messy.

A humorous and well-crafted memoir. 

Wreck By Kelley Jo Burke Radiant Press, 2021, pp.159 ISBN: 9781989274446