About 10 years ago, I stopped reading an essay by the American author Jo Ann Beard because it was too good. It was about a man called Werner who woke to the sound of screaming one night and, after some delay, realised his apartment building was on fire. He was on the fifth floor. The way Beard described shock distorting his sense of time was so vivid I found it hard to breathe in the bookshop where I stood. I had no idea if Werner survived in real life, was disfigured or even died – it was possible Beard was entering the thoughts of a man in his last moments, or imagining them for us, and this seemed so unbearable I put the book down and walked away from one of the best writers at work today. (Werner survived; he dived head-first through the window of an apartment opposite and landed on a stranger’s bed. So phew.)
You can find Beard’s most famous essay, The Fourth State of Matter, online at the New Yorker. This memoir seems to be about Beard’s dog problem and also her divorce problem when she was working in an American university office. About halfway through, the details become so exhaustive, so saturated with a sense of imminence, that I couldn’t take it any longer and clicked away to find out what happened next. Warning: you will spoil your reading of Jo Ann Beard if you break the circumference of her prose. The essay relates facts so random and extreme it makes you query the process of reading itself. It also displays Beard’s talent for the incidental: the dying dog and the absent husband are not the main subjects here, but this small death and ordinary absence are given the proper weight of our regard.
Serpent’s Tail has now published The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard on this side of the Atlantic, with one piece, Cheri, calved into a separate slim volume and described as a meld of “fiction and memory”. It is not Beard’s memory that is on the page, but the imagined memory of a woman called Cheri Tremble who had terminal cancer and died in 1997 assisted by Jack Kevorkian, the controversial advocate of voluntary euthanasia who was tried for murder four times. Cheri’s daughters are thanked in the acknowledgments, but she was not someone Beard knew well. When asked what she would have thought of the book, Beard said: “I think she would hate it,” as though conscious of some trespass. There is no moment so personal, perhaps, as our last.
It is possible to think that Cheri (who, by definition, cannot read this book) would approve the project as a daring act of empathy – that she would read it as though the events had happened to someone else and be moved by their fate. “When she awakens her breast is gone, melted into a long weeping wound across her chest. The first time she sees it, she feels a strange numbness, a smooth blank where her shock should be. A day later the mortification is so profound and clamorous that she has to disconnect, like hanging up the receiver when someone is shouting into your ear.”
Coming in under 15,000 words, Cheri is richly packed. The details are laid before the reader with a simplicity that feels like grace. Beard’s vocabulary is luminous. Her sentences bend around words such as hopeful, beautiful, courtesy, friends, sturdy, perfect, polished – they make a dark subject seem filled with light. The facts, however, are relentlessly sad. When Cheri seeks reconstruction surgery after a mastectomy, something goes wrong on the operating table. The nerves in one leg are damaged, leaving it “slack and rubbery”. After some time “her disability runs out and [her employer] Amtrak lets her go. She loses not only her paycheck but her pension and her benefits.”
The money is real, and the pain also has “a sharp glittering realness to it, like a diamond lodged in her hip”. But Cheri’s mind is prone to drift, to dreaming, dissociation and the intrusions of memory. Nine days before she is appointed to die, Cheri watches an engineer working at the top of a telephone pole outside her house. He uses a red handset plugged into the connection box and snips a piece of wire that falls to the grass below. “Something about the scene, framed by the glass of her living room window, embodies what she has been trying to understand.” This man, with his tools, cleats and harness, his weight suspended from the pole, “is the world without her in it”.
You might call death a moment of truth, but Beard makes it feel both real and unbelievable, beyond all our categories of truth. It is the moment where words stop. As Cheri becomes more hopelessly sick, she seems to abandon thinking. The narrative switches away from her point of view, as though she is too tired to carry it any more, and the focus shifts to the arrangements and assistance she needs to end her life. No details are spared of this last, illegal journey, with its almost comical difficulties and sense of impossible farewells. She is left in the living room of Kevorkian, a man previously described by one of her daughters as a “spry ghoul from the evening news”.
Beard is a graduate of the creative writing programme at Iowa, a teacher of writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She does not publish until a piece is fully realised, edited, re-edited, interrogated, improved, known. There can be something opaque in the flawlessness of this American style, something that feels almost religious in its precise and compassionate tone. Beard, however, combines the lapidary chill of Joan Didion with the sense of a proper, lived humanity that you get from a writer like Grace Paley or Sigrid Nunez. She is good company. She connects. You should read her and not look away.
• Cheri by Jo Ann Beard is published by Serpent’s Tail (£10). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 9 August 2023. An earlier version incorrectly named Cheri Tremble as Cheri Temple.
