Reviewed by Anne Kaier
Content Warning: Murder, infanticide, family violence, death, loss.
Why do people write memoir? I wondered about that while reading Ona Gritz’s riveting new book, Everywhere I Look. Unless you’re Prince Harry or Barbra Streisand, both of whom had a long line of readers queuing up before their books were under contract and, in Harry’s case, a ghostwriter hired, you need to figure out why people will be interested in your less starry story.
Gritz does have a page-turner to tell. In 1982, when Ona was nineteen, her visibly pregnant sister, Angie Boggs, was strangled by near-strangers who lived in the Boggs family apartment to help with the rent. Angie’s husband was shot with his own gun. Their toddler, Ray-Ray, was smothered. Gritz tells us this on the back flap and in the first paragraphs. The facts of the case, which could have been made known bit by bit throughout the book, are revealed immediately. No mystery here.
So why should we continue reading this rich and elegantly written book? To watch how Ona, who was visiting her sister the night before the murders occurred, slowly came to deal with their aftermath. At first, she felt numb. Then for years, although she blamed herself for an inability to mourn, she simply shut down memories of her adored sister. Angie had had a habit of running away when she was young and Ona, unable to accept her loss, figured her sister had simply disappeared again. But when Ona’s half-brother died and she became the sole survivor of her family of origin, Ona realized she was the only one who could tell stories about Angie. She began to open the case again, to look into the motives for the murders and, more importantly, to look into her own psyche and her family’s past. By risking the fierce emotions such an investigation might rouse, she hoped she could thaw her feelings about Angie—and bring her beloved sister back to her.
As we read, we too delve into Ona’s past. In a braided structure, scenes from her childhood are interspersed with scenes from her later life when she contacted lost relatives to uncover intimate family secrets. She was trying to understand her own psyche and what made Angie what she was. The results of her investigations aren’t always pretty. For example, because teenage Angie was unruly and ran away, her parents sent her to what was basically a reform school. The deeper Gritz delved into the family history, the more she understood the complex dynamics which had such an influence on her life and on her sister’s.
Ona was the favored child: smart, good in school, the apple of her mother’s eye—for reasons she came to understand as she investigated her past, and that I won’t reveal here for fear of spoilers. Gritz believes her cerebral palsy played into this favoritism. Because of a brain injury at birth or soon after it, she walked with a slight limp and her palsied right arm made it hard to grasp things.
Even when Ona was already seventeen,
Mom still rushed to prepare a snack for me the moment I so much as wandered towards the kitchen. At the core of this was my disability, though she never said it. “There’s nothing you can’t do,” she’d assure me but what felt like a moment later, she’d insist “Let me do that for you.” Mom still cut up my meat for me and she trimmed my finger and toenails for me.
As a mature narrator, Ona reflects on this dynamic as she reflects on her past life throughout the book.
To be babied, I understood, was to be loved too much. To be given not just my share of our mother’s devotion but also yours [Angie’s] and our half-siblings. Yet, though I grasped this, I never lingered there long. Because, of course, I wouldn’t have traded. Because, of course, I loved her too much.
It’s this kind of insight that makes Gritz’s book so compelling. How will she evolve from the strictures of her upbringing? Most readers have been affected in ways we often do not understand until we are grown, by our parents’ expectations for us and by the ways they show their tangled emotions about us.
Ona’s disability and her mother’s hovering over her led to an inability to query her parents when she was young, to ask why Angie was always disappearing. When her adored sister was sent away to the reform school, young Ona was told Angie was at “boarding school.” She didn’t question that explanation, unable to rattle her mother. I have a theory that people with a visible disability, including me with my severe skin disorder, tend to try to keep everyone around them happy, on an even keel. Since we deal with curious strangers every day, strangers who may be fearful of contagion and of the unknown, we don’t want to alarm them—and this stilling of our own emotions spills over into our relationships with our friends and family. Perhaps this instinct to keep the peace, not to let powerful emotions such as anger flood out was one of the reasons—along with PTSD from the trauma of murders–that kept the young Ona from recognizing the profound grief she felt at Angie’s death.
The crucial scene, for me, came near the end of the book, when Gritz had been reading online the lies and invectives of the murderer, Philip Henderson. He showed no remorse for what he’d done.
It took me thirty years to feel enraged about it, but now my cold hands shook while my face burned from within…. And while I never would have thought my fury could do any good, the emotion was so intense, so long overdue and right in this instance, it broke me open.
When I read this, I clapped my hands. “Way to go, Ona!” I thought. “You finally got mad.” No longer the reasonable woman who sought to keep the peace, she finally said what everyone who reads this story would likely agree with: the most powerful emotion you can feel, in your body and your soul, at the calculated killers of a pregnant woman and her toddler son, is a fierce anger.
One of the pleasures of this accomplished book is to watch as the mature Ona slowly and with immense emotional courage opened up her past and her family’s dealings so she could finally allow herself to grieve, to feel how much she missed and loved her sister. What broke her open is anger—an unfashionable emotion in a decent person these days but one, I think, with the power to heal.
Title: Everywhere I Look: A Memoir
Author: Ona Gritz
Publisher: Apprentice House
Year: 2024
Read a review of Ona Gritz’s book, The Space You Left Behind, and Ona’s review of My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert in this issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Book Reviews | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
About the Reviewer
Kaier’s essays have appeared widely in venues such as The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, 1966journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times for which she appeared on NPR’s Radio Times. “Maple Lane” was mentioned on the list of notables in an edition of Best American Essays. Excerpts from her memoir manuscript, They Said I Couldn’t Have a Love Life, have been published in The Woven Tale and Persimmon Review. Her poetry collection How Can I Say It Was Not Enough? won the Propel Poetry Award and is forthcoming in winter 2024-25 from Nine Mile Books and Syracuse University Press. Poems have appeared in several anthologies including the 2012 ALA Notable Book, Beauty is a Verb: A New Poetry of Disability. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and has served on a Fulbright screening committee for creative writers.