Reviewed by Tom DeBeauchamp

Sometimes, silence is best. Not for its quiet or calm, but because, in its unwrittenness, its unspokenness, it remains open to possibilities words can only obscure. Silence contains the radical, overlapping, and multivalent energies every moment is made of. To write it is to disfigure and limit it, and yet, everywhere it is already overwritten. Saying nothing won't lead back to silence, but instead allows the normalizing histories of a hostile, conformity-obsessed culture to act as the truth. That one must speak into silence to preserve even a fragment of its vastness from these gross simplifications is the paradox upon which so much of Camille Roy's collection Honey Mine rests.

The collection's last story, a piece called "Afterword," movingly summarizes the stakes of Roy's representational resistances. Following the death of her wife of 36 years, certain of Roy's acquaintances begin asking her rather asinine questions. They ignore the deep intimacy she and Angie, her wife, had shared, and seek only to assign Angie to a type. Grief that so much of her wife's rebellious fullness is being erased fills Roy with "a desire to represent." "There is a haze," she says, "around violations of the gender contract. People who live that rebellion successfully, with grace and courage, must be seen to be believed. Their disappearance is more profound because the rules they broke in life reformulate in their absence, as if they never lived."

But Roy and her friends disrupt this erasure by hosting a memorial at which they tell stories of Angie from their different perspectives. They create an "historical document" that depends for its authority on its polyvocality. Though the rest of Honey Mine achieves its many voices by other means—time, primarily—it nevertheless resists closure in ways very similar to those of the memorial. Drawn together from diverse collections, anthologies, and chapbooks, and exhibiting radically different forms and structures, its stories refuse to be reformulated or reduced to a single meaning.

Rather, meaning in Honey Mine is thick, blurred, and overlapping. Similar facts sometimes show up in different stories with different characters attached to different roles. Camille—one of many characters so named—may work reception at the massage parlor in "Perils," but in "Artificial" it's Barb. Often, Roy interjects into the talky flow of her fictional narratives the sharp, disjunctive edges of her literary and cultural critique. There is a mobility and breadth to the interests of these texts that regularly explodes simple anecdotes into whole worlds of feeling and thought. Roy's desire to represent, with its insistent openness, makes no claims to truth. Instead, she offers something richer, more complicated and harder to achieve: honesty.

"My attempt at realistic narrative," she says in "Under-Grid," "is a surrender to nostalgia." Nostalgia is "the vehicle through which my past has survived." It's a fraught word, recalling as much as anything the violence of political reaction, but Roy is the first to acknowledge the corruption of her tools. Nostalgia may guide her toward history, but, she knows, it's only ever over a highway of omissions, fabrications, and lies. When the narrator of "Agatha Letters," asks, "How can a story be true when it’s situated inside distortion?" this is what she has in mind.

Perhaps the best description of Roy’s approach to honesty comes in the overture to "Craquer: An Essay on Class Struggle." In it—a long family story of ancestors, money, and the literal price of not fitting in—Roy's cousin, Sam, surprises her with a visit. He's insulted because she's written somewhere "about his speed addiction and rumors that he ran guns and drugs for the wrong side in small countries," and he wants her to feel terrible about it. Roy, thankfully, refuses the guilt trip. She writes, "It boiled down to this—if I’m the only one with the appetite to tell a story, it must belong to me. I do the work. It comes down to my appetite, which in turn comes down to whatever grips my powers of recognition. That’s what makes my little engine purr. I take the facts and expand along lines of thrill, aiming for unreliability, its quivering heart."

When Roy reaches into the past and grabs hold of the fragments of her living, they're different than she'd expected, possessed of whole lives she'd forgotten. To nostalgia's chagrin, perhaps, she finds versions of herself charged with and made strange by unremembered valences of possibility. “The truest respect one can show towards the past,” she says, “is to allow it to be something other than a predecessor of the present. Perhaps its alien and most forbidden nature did not reproduce.” The Camilles she meets in these stories, no matter how much she remembers or learns, always exceed her ability to fully know them. They expand just beyond the reach of her powers of recognition and, for Roy, emphasizing this essential incompleteness is as much an ethical imperative as it is an aesthetic one. To bring something as expansive as the past out of its silence and into a story feeds back, crackles, and becomes the distortion so crucial to Roy's poetics.

This balancing act of representation—its being both the only defense against erasure and a lie—is further complicated by Roy's preference for that original silence. Despite her engine's purring and the obvious pleasures of following Honey Mine's many lines of thrill, there are throughout the book reminders that memory and writing are necessary—even pleasurable and sustaining—evils, distractions from living real life even as they make reliving it (sort of) possible.

At the end of "Afterword," Roy says she wants, "to create silence around myself on these matters, not discourse." She wants to live in silence's "nourishing emptiness." Though she offers Honey Mine to speak for her, her desire for silence here can't help but feel tragic. Even so, other, more joyful silences exist. There are moments, as in the long story, "Perils," where the abandonment of language expresses the purest form of connection. After dozens of pages of Camille conforming to other characters' demands, she arrives at the massage parlor where she works, meets Dusty Beans, her lover, for the first time, and transcends the scene into a sublimely wordless "love moment." She writes, "I shot a quick glance at Dusty. We connected as if our eyeballs were attached. Awkwardness rippled through our every nerve. Something happened. It felt sort of like blood pushing into damaged tissue. Sort of ugly. One of those love moments. I relished it. I felt sick. I knew it would be ages before Dusty and I calmed down enough to carry on a conversation." 

Language-proof love moments like this one are at the core of Honey Mine, the secret spaces its words preserve and recover. While Honey Mine as a collection is a kind of "historical document," it is more than that as well, charged and burning with its own undiminished radical power. Rather than collapsing in its contradictions, its disjunctions, it weaves its many desires—for silence and language and accuracy and thrill—into a kind of multi-dimensional honesty instead. It builds from the fragments of a life, of lives, a whole secret world, many-layered, self-reflecting, expansive and expanding. Of the book, Roy writes, "I hope that it can be entered by anyone, and feasted upon, like the washed-up carcass of a whale." Like a whale, it is nearly inexhaustible, and, like a whale, it is profoundly nourishing too. Its stories are filled with silence's unknown potential.