Chemo, radiation, a zillion surgeries, watching my mom age twenty years in twenty months: if that’s part of the Big Dude’s plan, then it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Somebody Up There Hates You.SUTHY has landed me here in this hospice, where we—that’s me and Sylvie—are the only people under 30 in the whole place, sweartogod. But I’m not dead yet. I still need to keep things interesting. Sylvie, too. I mean, we’re kids, hospice-hostages or not. We freak out visitors; I get my uncle to sneak me out for one insane Halloween night. Stuff like that. And Sylvie wants to make things even more interesting. That girl’s got big plans.
Only Sylvie’s father is so nuclear-blasted by what’s happened to his little girl, he glows orange, I swear. That’s one scary man, and he’s not real fond of me. So we got a major family feud going on, right here in hospice. DO NOT CROSS line running down the middle of the hall, me on one side, her on the other. It’s crazy.
In the middle of all of this, really, there’s just me and Sylvie, a guy and a girl. And we want to live, in our way, by our own rules, in whatever time we’ve got. We will pack in some living before we go, trust me
BIOGRAPHY
Corporeality, Hollis Seamon's new collection of stories, published by Able Muse Press, will be available in January 2013. Alan Davis has called this “. . . a wonderful collection of stories, dazzling and unsentimental, full of everyday tragedies, fairy-tale motifs, and rambunctious, life-affirming characters.” Hollis's young adult novel, Somebody Up There Hates You, will be published in September 2013 with Algonquin Books.
Hollis's mystery novel, Flesh, was published by Memento Mori Mysteries of Avocet Press in 2005. Hollis's book of short stories, Body Work, was published by Spring Harbor Press in 2000. A Publishers Weekly review (April 10, 2000) described the book: “The lives of women and girls are unconventionally and richly explored in Body Work by Hollis Seamon. With precise prose alternately chatty and subtly resonant, Seamon delves into female adolescence, body issues, sexuality, relationships between mothers and daughters, and other themes, often keenly revealing the magical, uncanny and symbolic meanings in everyday life.” Douglas Glover called the book, “A sexy, edgy collection of stories about women on the brink.”
Seamon's short stories have recently appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction International,The Greensboro Review, The Nebraska Review, Persimmon Tree, and The Chicago Review. Her work has been included in anthologies such as The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008), Celestial Electric Set (Emrys Foundation, 2008), and The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness (The Feminist Press, 2003). Her short story “Death is the New Sleep” won the 2009 Al Blanchard Award for Short Crime Fiction and was included in Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writiers (Level Best Books, 2010). A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, Hollis is Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY and teaches for the Fairfield University MFA in Creative Writing Program. She lives in Kinderhook NY.
When I received this book I was scared! I have read books about death and dying and I always end up crying my eyes out. Well with this one. Seamon creates a wonderful story about a teen whom is dying is cancer. But within these pages you will find humor, laughter, and more! This book is a powerful story about a boy whom doesn't want to give up and will never surrender. I really loved Sylvie but I wish we could have gotten a little more of her. I have heard that this one is like The Fault In Our Stars. Which is not a bad thing. This is deff one book to grab.
"*I received a copy of this book for free to review, this in no way influenced my review, all opinions are 100% honest and my own."
Somebody Up There Hates You began many years ago when my four-year-
old son started going to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New
York, to the hospital known then as “Babies,” for multiple surgeries and
other treatments. Between 1976 and 1990, he was a “repeat offender.”
That’s what the kids who returned for frequent hospitalizations called
themselves. These kids often met up during coincidental visits to Babies,
instantly falling back into hospital friendship mode. When well enough,
they played video games in the playroom, reluctantly attended school
sessions in the mornings, and raced the ancient wooden wheelchairs
through the corridors. They learned to use their IV poles as scooters,
pushing off with one foot and then putting both feet on the bottom of the
pole and sailing down the halls, bags of IV fluids waving above them. That
was the fun side of being in Babies. The other side was pain, suffering, and
a constant longing for home. My son always did get to go home, and we
celebrated every time. But some of those kids never left the hospital. And
in many ways, I’ve come to realize, Babies has never left me.
The patients at Babies who made the biggest impression on me were the teenagers, at once heartbreaking and hilarious. No matter how ill, how miserably uncomfortable, how very real the mortal danger, those kids remained, stubbornly and defiantly, teenagers: rebellious; foul-mouthed; irreverent; pains-in-the-ass to nurses, doctors, and parents alike—and wonderfully funny. Often, the teenagers on our floor would gather at the nurses’ station late at night, talking, laughing, and flirting. I would lie on the cot beside my son’s bed and listen. Their voices spun stories through those long, sleep-deprived nights, and when sleep did come, their voices wove themselves into my dreams.
The patients at Babies who made the biggest impression on me were the teenagers, at once heartbreaking and hilarious. No matter how ill, how miserably uncomfortable, how very real the mortal danger, those kids remained, stubbornly and defiantly, teenagers: rebellious; foul-mouthed; irreverent; pains-in-the-ass to nurses, doctors, and parents alike—and wonderfully funny. Often, the teenagers on our floor would gather at the nurses’ station late at night, talking, laughing, and flirting. I would lie on the cot beside my son’s bed and listen. Their voices spun stories through those long, sleep-deprived nights, and when sleep did come, their voices wove themselves into my dreams.
That’s where Richie, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Somebody Up
There Hates You, came from. He represents all of those smart, mouthy,
indomitable, fiercely alive kids. Sylvie, the girl he falls in love with, came
from there, too. Richie and Sylvie are in hospice; they are dying. But they
are still alive, growing up in that intense hospital space where time flows
at a different pace and every moment is heightened. Things happen, to
them and around them, every day. As Richie says, “Dying is pretty boring,
if you get right down to it. It’s the living here that’s actually interesting, a
whole lot more than I ever would have imagined.”
Richie’s right: hospitals are bursting with stories. Walk down any corridor and glance, only briefly, for hospital etiquette requires that you never stare, into the patients’ rooms. Listen for a minute: in every room, a drama is occurring. Fights and struggles, triumphs and devastating losses, in every single room, every single day. Everyone there is a character, and every event becomes part of a plot. Nothing is certain; everything seems dependent on some arbitrary roll of some strangely loaded dice. Everyone is a gambler, and the stakes are sky high. What a training ground for fiction writers.
One other thing, more recent, helped create Somebody Up There Hates You. In 2005, my beloved brother-in-law Matt was admitted to a hospice unit in a small hospital in Hudson, New York. In the corridor there, beside the elevator, was a harpist. The effect of stepping into that place and encountering harp music was, well, just totally weird. That harpist appears on the very first page of the novel. That’s also where my original “SUTHY Syndrome” story began, with Richie describing the weirdness of the harpist and then telling us how he and Sylvie lit up their hospice on the night before Halloween. After that story was published in the Bellevue Literary Review in 2009, I thought I’d heard the last from Richie.
Nope. Richie kept right on talking. Clearly, he had much, much more to say and to do.
So that story grew into this novel. The echoes of all those kids’ voices somehow came together, mixing with the notes of a harp. This composition played in my ears for years and then emerged as Somebody Up There Hates You, a book written to honor repeat offenders everywhere.
Richie’s right: hospitals are bursting with stories. Walk down any corridor and glance, only briefly, for hospital etiquette requires that you never stare, into the patients’ rooms. Listen for a minute: in every room, a drama is occurring. Fights and struggles, triumphs and devastating losses, in every single room, every single day. Everyone there is a character, and every event becomes part of a plot. Nothing is certain; everything seems dependent on some arbitrary roll of some strangely loaded dice. Everyone is a gambler, and the stakes are sky high. What a training ground for fiction writers.
One other thing, more recent, helped create Somebody Up There Hates You. In 2005, my beloved brother-in-law Matt was admitted to a hospice unit in a small hospital in Hudson, New York. In the corridor there, beside the elevator, was a harpist. The effect of stepping into that place and encountering harp music was, well, just totally weird. That harpist appears on the very first page of the novel. That’s also where my original “SUTHY Syndrome” story began, with Richie describing the weirdness of the harpist and then telling us how he and Sylvie lit up their hospice on the night before Halloween. After that story was published in the Bellevue Literary Review in 2009, I thought I’d heard the last from Richie.
Nope. Richie kept right on talking. Clearly, he had much, much more to say and to do.
So that story grew into this novel. The echoes of all those kids’ voices somehow came together, mixing with the notes of a harp. This composition played in my ears for years and then emerged as Somebody Up There Hates You, a book written to honor repeat offenders everywhere.
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2 comments:
Book looks very interesting would like to read.
Sounds very interesting! I'll to read this. :)
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