- Soft Skull Press
- Kyle Boelte writes about fog, and it will make you very, very, sad.
Here’s what I know about Kyle Boelte: When Karen Green’s memoir Bough Down came out in 2013, he was one of only a handful of reviewers who wrote about it without identifying its subject, Green’s late husband, David Foster Wallace. Boelte could see that her book, while apparently about Wallace’s suicide, was really about something else entirely: how a person survives in the face of violent, instantaneous loss. In Boelte’s review, Wallace’s name is never mentioned; Bough Down wasn’t about Wallace, after all—it was about grief.
After reading Boelte’s new memoir, The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting, the origin of his empathy for Green could not be clearer. Boelte’s brother’s suicide is at the heart of The Beautiful Unseen, a book that’s equal parts memoir and historical excavation. It’s about Boelte’s brother, Kris, who hung himself at the age of 16, but it is most of all about grief. It’s also about the fog of San Francisco, which, interspersed with meditations on childhood, serves as a metaphor for the blindness brought on by receding memories, the isolation of pain, and the impenetrable nature of suicide—a loss that will never make sense.
Still, Boelte does look for answers (or at least origins), unearthing artifacts from Kris’ life—his adoption papers and his death certificate, his CD collection and his disciplinary record—and seeking out scientific studies on fog and suicide. Throughout, he discovers that opposition to building a much-needed suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge is “mainly based on aesthetics”, and that fog, sinker of ships and life force of California redwoods, is “only fog when you are inside of it.”