“If I hoped to save my father’s life then,” begins Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn in her debut memoir, “I hope now to understand our history.”
And there’s much to try to understand in Loose of Earth—how, for instance, Blackburn’s father, a fit-as-a-fiddle thirty-eight-year-old veteran and airline pilot, comes to be diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal form of colon cancer; why, with his wife’s eager support, he forgoes chemotherapy or any other form of medical treatment; why he and his family believe with certainty that they can—indeed, must—pray away his illness; and how an adolescent girl’s earnest faith is reduced to tatters.
Blackburn’s prose is impeccable, and her narrative utterly absorbing. Her father’s worsening illness—and the impotence of their faith, as well as her mother’s ample and inventive battery of alternative, Christian-tinged homeopathy—is the central preoccupation of Loose of Earth, an evangelical West Texas bildungsroman. But the book also explores the rich inner life of a clever adolescent girl: her experience of eldest siblinghood with four precocious youngsters below her, her relationship to a broader culture that her family rejects, and her emerging sexuality in the context of an intensely matriarchal, militant Christian home.
Blackburn’s mother, Beverly, is a holy tyrant, intensely intelligent, domineering and unchallengeable in matters of faith and everything else. She discerns, from seemingly all options, both her husband and her veterinary vocation. She homeschools her children while working two days a week at the animal clinic, and at one point successfully delivers her own baby while squatting over a “makeshift pad of soiled bathroom towels” after her doctor questions her on a point of science.
Beverly is one to “do her own research”—which is to say that she is also the ringleader for the idea that her husband’s illness is nothing but a test of her family’s faith. She scours the internet for alternative, ideally Christian remedies, and consults books titled How I Beat Colon Cancer and Alternative Cancer Treatments. She throws out all the family’s food—no sugar, no flour. She starts to make her own bread from scratch with wheat berries and an industrial grinder. The neighbors insist, “There is nothing like your bread, Beverly.”
Her homeopathic studies are also accelerated:
Evangelical texts about supernatural healing appear along with books on the merits of raw juice and bone broth. Next to Benny Hinn’s Miracle of Healing is Susan Baxter’s Immune Power. A.B. Simpson’s The Gospel of Healing sits beside a book whose title will haunt me—Sharks Don’t Get Cancer, a text that has led Dad to drink ground shark cartilage diluted in water.
Blackburn is very witty in describing all this, and very funny, despite the ever-present undercurrent of manic desperation that mingles with a fervent faith. Describing her mother’s industrial-grade juicer, she remarks on the “industrial-grade anus” from which the vegetal sludge emerges: “Dad drinks down the liquid and says it’s the kind of taste you get used to, praise God.”
Her father John is Job-like, a gentle and genuine man of seemingly conventional politics. We learn later on of his time living with Beverly when the two were a young couple on the U.S. military base in Guam—a kind of extremely verdant Lubbock in the Pacific, for all its amenities. Here we get a picture of them before disaster strikes, a smart pair embarking on an adventure. No matter how recklessly they are driven to behave in times of extremity, Beverly and John emerge from the pages as flawed but often sympathetic, never less than fully formed individuals struggling to make sense out of a senseless tragedy.
But the relationship between her mother’s hard professional expertise in veterinary medicine and her outsized capacities for buying into, well, total bullshit is a mystery even to Blackburn. Humans are just bizarre and interesting and sometimes baffling. It would be reductive and definitely unfair to call her a “villain,” but Beverly strikes fear into the heart, like Melville’s white whale or Judge Holden. It seems impossible for anyone involved in this story to contest her on anything, especially on matters of faith and family.
On page 112, we receive the following, on discipline:
Mom told me once that her own mother beat her with a two-by-four spiked with nails. She laughed when she described it, how she jumped in the air with each puncture to her legs. She insists that spanking is different and speaks in cliché, saying it hurts her more. She does it because she loves me.
In fact, in this family, all corporal punishment (there’s quite a bit of it), is framed as an inevitable act of love.
We are made to feel Beverly’s omniscience and omnipotence as Blackburn does. Caught red-handed after she shaved her legs at a friend’s urging—a cardinal offense—she withers under her mother’s gaze.
“Do you want to know how I know?” asks Beverly. “God told me.”
They deal with numerous faith-healers at her mother’s behest, and the scenes within the tents to which Beverly tows their seven-strong troupe are obscene. “A charlatan,” her mother calls one of them. (Of course, were he the real deal, she would know.)
Because John’s medical crisis is actually a crisis of faith, a test of the family’s faith, the eldest daughter comes to shoulder the brunt of the work to pass that test. While her mother is occupied engineering a miracle, she assumes all the caregiving duties for her four younger siblings. These pressures take an intense psychic toll on Blackburn; she’s caught between an all-seeing God and an all-seeing mother and, in her own mind, found wanting by both.
Because cancer is not an affliction of the soul but of the body, John is long in dying. Near the end, the former distance runner is almost totally immobilized by pain and tumors that distend and distort his physique. “Faith demands that Dad call pain a trial,” writes Blackburn. “But this afternoon he calls pain pain.” Beverly orders her daughter to refuse her father his OxyContin, for to give him the pills is to allow him to invite a demon into his body. Even as he rifles through the cabinets, she obeys. Even as he begs. (Blackburn, now apparently of no faith at all, often reflects on how her family is compelled by the dictates of their religion to subdue their better human instincts.)
Blackburn’s tale imparts another insight about human instincts: there will always be those who seek to blame the sick for their own illnesses, as well as those who wish to profit from them. Writing about a strain of quack science known as “German New Medicine,” oncologist David Gorski notes that, for these types, “cancer isn’t a disease but rather a manifestation of something going on in the mind”—or in this case, the soul. This view of reality is of the same cloth as the positive-visualization techniques popularized by The Secret (or “manifesting,” for Gen Z). In this worldview, to fail to recover is not to be failed—by treatments, luck, or one’s own body—but something much crueler: to have failed oneself. To be at fault.
If anything, such attitudes have become more common since Blackburn’s youth. Victim-blaming is a pillar of the wellness movement, where the key to getting better is often a raft of expensive supplements or a question of eliminating seed oils. Or have you tried yoga? Suffering “severe” panic attacks and depression in her twenties and having seen “all the specialists,” celebrity supermodel Gisele Bündchen turned to a naturopath, who was reassuringly unequivocal: “Gisele, we have to change your diet.”
To be unwell is simply not to have worked at it—as if it’s the same as being a bit boring, having never taken the time to cultivate hobbies, or feeling groggy because you like to burn the midnight oil. Lifestyle is at once the cause of, and prescription for, all one’s ailments. But as Blackburn amply proves, sometimes people just get sick, and no amount of dieting, regimen-retuning, or boutique snake oils is sufficient to beat back metastatic cancer—nor is homemade bread, home-juiced carrots, or towering righteousness.
If there’s a lacuna in Blackburn’s narrative, it’s an environmental-science thread: her father’s diagnosis came after a life spent amidst environments which were almost certainly saturated by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Blackburn doggedly follows up leads, going straight at bureaucratic military stonewalls, to try to build this case (this part of the narrative feels a bit dark and even noir-ish at times), but lacks, in the end, anything that would prove definitive. Seemingly anticipating this, Blackburn writes, “In a world where we think of cause and effect as something like a gun and a bullet, the slower, less instant forms of destruction often hide in plain sight, in bodies of water and land and people.”
Blackburn’s memoir is an account of this slow kind of destruction, and chronicling her father’s inexorable decline comes at some evident cost to herself. But Loose of Earth is also an immense testament to the capacity of a daughter’s love—and an act of faith in our better human instincts.
Loose of Earth
A Memoir
Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn
University of Texas Press
$26.95 | 216 pp.
