New York Readers! Reese’s Book Club is back at Hudson Yards for STORYfest on August 19. We’ll be screening the finale of Lucky, followed by a Q&A with the author, Marissa Stapley. Stick around for additional goodies and a meet-and-greet with the author. RSVP Now.
The Summer Reading Challenge prizes are officially here! Win an exclusive Reese’s Book Club gift box packed with curated book picks, our custom candle, sweet treats, and more. 🌞 To enter, simply share a photo of your finished bingo card in the dedicated chat thread opening August 24 (must be a premium subscriber to win!).*
But the giveaways don’t stop there. We’re teaming up with Ko’a Kea Resort to treat one lucky reader to the escape of a lifetime. Enter on Ko’a Kea’s website by August 21 to win a dream getaway to Ko’a Kea Resort* on Poipu Beach, complete with a 5-night stay, flight stipend, resort credit, and a Reese’s Book Club tote featuring a curated selection of our monthly book picks.**
And finally, for the Elle fans out there, we’re giving away a splashy pink gift bundle to make every day feel like the perfect day in your household. All episodes are out on Prime Video now, so book that binge-watch!
If you like hearing from The Wild Beneath author Kelly Anderson, we’ll be back with more bookish discussion during our Book Club Live on August 21 at 3p ET. Join us here on Substack!
By Kelly Anderson
The Wild Beneath begins with a tidal wave that subsumes everything. In the prologue, I wrote, “The ocean will call it a song.”
I want to tell you about a time I was so underwater, I could not find the surface—and how dissolving inside a tidal wave is, sometimes, the only way to save ourselves.
In most interviews and essays about this novel, when I’m asked where it came from, I’ve answered truthfully: “It was a dark time for me in 2019 when this story found me.”
Here is the fuller truth of that time, and it started much earlier than 2019.
Eleven years ago, when I was emerging from medical residency and we had a toddler and a newborn, my husband, Mathieu, sustained a traumatic brain injury. This is something we have found impossible to talk about: how deep underwater we both went at that time, and how it’s taken an impossible decade and writing a novel for us to resurface, together.
The brain injury decimated my husband. While he heroically struggled to survive, sound was intolerable to him. We could not talk. He wore noise-blocking headphones to try to endure life itself. His vision tunneled, and everything was dark and too-bright all at the same time.
I did what women often do within their families, which was harden and attempt (ungracefully and often unsuccessfully) to take care of everything. I became an armored warrior of sorts—metallic and impenetrable on the outside—so I could attend to the needs of our two young boys and my injured husband, alongside dozens of patients in clinics and emergency departments each week. I paid our taxes, made stir-fry, cleaned the bathroom grout, bought formula for our seven-month-old, who was at day care, while I work-work-worked the night shifts.
Eleven years ago, or perhaps earlier, I began a descent to the bottom of the ocean, and there was serious risk that I would never find my way to the surface again. No one knew how far down I went. For many years, I had no sense of myself. I was lost, swallowed by a tidal wave that would not let me go.
Except—miraculously—I found a pen, and during a three-point turn in our driveway in the winter of 2019, I met a godlike character from The Wild Beneath who told me that metamorphosis was possible.
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