Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass

Gretty has more clutching at her than her mom's knapsacked ashes. Her legacy includes a web of stories: some from grandfathers who survived the Holocaust and some from parents who didn't. These stories are woven by living cultures and deadly traumas so much deeper and older. These stories continue to grow and tangle.

• Born deaf and on the spectrum, it's a challenge not to be eccentric.
• Knowing her parents didn't want her, it's a struggle not to surrender to sadness.
• Alive and full of fight, it's impossible NOT to be ferocious!

This odd novel is a clutch of stories, poems, songs, dramas, and prayers which "congeal" to query the value of the narratives we partially create and which partially create us.

Are we "really" the stories we tell ourselves we are?

On one level it's the story of an ENORMOUSLY inadequate man and his bumbling attempts to explain certain disturbances to his tiny semi-autistic, hyper-kinetic, and profoundly deaf daughter. The principal disturbances he flails with are The Holocaust and its ever-rippling effects on their family including the suicide of his wife (HER mother). But "Gredible" has cochlear implants which she can employ to shut down audible input-or to surreptitiously listen and absorb, not that her dopy Fat Dad is particularly circumspect about what he says in front of her. But when his daughter's body betrays the inexorable symptoms of outgrowing childhood, "what churses does he gotz?

Then there are the stories of her two grandfathers, each with aged arms scarred with certain bleak tattoos. Before he died, one grandad had strived with gentle strangeness to inoculate her (and all children) from human evil, creating absurdly inappropriate "stories" with input from Gredible and her Fat Dad. Her other grandfather (alive at the start of this novel) fiercely refused either to tell tales or to conceal secrets, but nevertheless was at the center of all manner of unsettling rumors and questions. Still, somehow prior to language or even cognition, little Streamly Gredible is burdened with a certain type of somatic "knowledge" of what all the adults are fumbling with.

She is her own type of disturbance, and WE ARE THE BIG BANG!

On another level "Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass" is a comic agitation and an open-ended agony about the consequence of bringing any new being into our streaming rush of existence with all its ferocious push and accelerating forces. And, given her multiple legacies from many progenitors, this child is rigidly constituted to accept neither victimhood or passivity.

We are "created" only to create in ever expanding dimensions.

https: //www.streamlygredible.com/

Publisher: Kalabram
Published: 12/09/2022
Pages: 398
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9798218046903