Eiren Caffall’s memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary conflates her own genetic illness with the degradation of marine ecosystems profoundly and acutely in one of the year’s best books.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“In this stunning and original debut, writer and musician Caffall draws links between hereditary illness and the fates of marine life in collapsing ecosystems. Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership.”
In her own words, here is Eiren Caffall’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary:
My memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, is a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of my family as we face our life-threatening illness on their shores. The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf. I’ve lived alongside these ecosystems while carrying my family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and raising a child who may also.
Even though I always wanted to write books, for the first twenty years of my creative life after college I wrote music. I moved to Chicago in 1994, determined to live there for only a year and playing no instruments at all, and by the time of the Great Chicago Heatwave of 1995 I was the owner of the lap steel guitar, determined never to leave the city, hanging out on a Ukrainian Village roof with Richard Buckner, and writing the songs that would be my first record.
I recorded that album in an old meat freezer in West Town, the next one on the stage at Lounge Ax on a night when there were no shows, the next two in proper studios—though the second was an old cinderblock Ukrainian Boy Scout Lodge. I played shows in Chicago and on the East Coast and got one or two good notices and a lot of good posters out of it. But through all of this, I also lived with Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), the incurable genetic disease that killed my father’s family, almost all of them, before they turned 50. I was told I wouldn’t even live that long, and so the act of making music was both a creative left turn and a way to throw myself at joy, at the audacity and wildness of going on stage and claiming something I had also loved my whole life, but that seemed somehow, even less plausible than writing books.
The nature of my illness meant that the career of songwriter, one that requires building momentum, networking, touring, and, in the ’90s being a woman willing to run with the boys, was not really possible for me. My dad would get sick, or I would, nearly every time I released an album. I spent my only tour mostly in his hospital room, and then on the road with bronchitis. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and by the time I started to have symptoms of my illness, I just let it go. Four records in, one ready to record, it was suddenly more possible to finish my books from the bed where I rode out chronic pain and fatigue from my failing kidneys and stop playing. Instead, I turned to writing essays, and eventually books, about dying ecosystems, about climate grief, about flooding, about loss.
For all these reasons, music is essential to this book. The playlist below follows the story I laid out above. I know myself, and my biography, and my body, deeply through the music I was listening to. These songs are touchstones to the book, some are referenced in it, but all made it happen.
Paul Simon: Graceland
The book begins with the accident, one night in 2014, the accident that told me my kidneys were getting worse. I was alone with my nine-year-old son, 12 miles out to sea, in the middle of a nor’easter, on a tiny island, in the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem. On the way there, we’d listened to Paul Simon’s album Graceland, a favorite of my kid, especially that one song, Graceland, with its lyrics, “my traveling companion is nine years old/he is the child of my first marriage,” which was completely true. Listening, we had no idea that hours later we would be in a Coast Guard cutter on climate change fueled fifteen-foot seas, me wondering whether this was the beginning of my health failing at last, him wondering what had happened to his mother.
James Taylor: Sweet Baby James
The book leaves us both at this moment of fear and goes back into the history of my family and our relationship with water, both the water inside our bodies from disease, and the water we lived alongside. When I was nine, we lived in the Berkshires and visited my grandmother on the Long Island Sound. My mother was in love with the ocean. My father was getting sick. He was in love with the Berkshire Hills. She knew we’d have to leave them if she was going to get a job and save us. This song has verses about the Hills that I grew up in as a child of Hippie transplants, and about the sailors on the ocean so close by. I never hear it without thinking of my parents going back to the land when they had never been there before, of the community that was built around Alice’s Restaurant, where my mother cooked, and that came apart as the wealthy and connected moved on to other utopias. I still can’t hear Arlo Guthrie’s song without thinking of that, though this James Taylor song, which I came to sing as a lullaby to my kid, brings up only sweet nostalgia.
Joni Mitchell: River
When my father was sickest during my teens, he and my mother dulled their pain and fear with alcohol. They’d be asleep early, empty jugs of wine around the kitchen. After they fell asleep, I’d turn on the TV in our dark living room and watch Thirtysomething. On one of those nights, they used Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece River on a holiday episode. I’d heard Joni before, in the background at parties thrown by my parents’ friends, on the college radio station in town. But for the first time I heard her, heard her singing right to me. I wish I had a river I could skate away on, back to the ocean, away from everything.
Vic Chesnutt: Dodge
I was diagnosed with my father’s illness when I was twenty-two and about to go back to my last year of college. At diagnosis, I was told that I had five years of kidney function ahead of me, that I’d never have kids, that I had an 80% higher chance of having a brain aneurysm. In the wake of that news, I burned down my life, broke up with my lovely boyfriend and holed up in a cottage in Seattle writing a thesis on illness and the body. When I graduated, I crossed the country with a friend who changed my life by playing me mixtapes of the indie rock that was exploding in Seattle, Chicago, Georgia. By the time we reached the Badlands, I knew Vic Chesnutt’s Dodge by heart and would sing it under the stars.
Songs Ohia: Two Blue Lights
I landed in Chicago with my indie rock mixtapes, my newly minted diagnosis, a love of water, and a thesis about illness and the body and the history of American radicalism. Driving along the lakeshore, or into the old warehouse districts, or past Lounge Ax, falling in love with the city felt like a brick to the head—harsh, permanent, instantaneous. I knew I wanted to make music; I knew I wanted to live in Chicago. I knew that nothing was ever going to be the same. I met Jason Molina, the brilliant songwriter behind Songs: Ohia years later, when I was working in the trenches of that working class music town and so was he. “Just keep working,” he told me one night at a show at Shubas when I was complaining that I’d lost momentum to yet another health crisis from my dad’s disease. “You have to work fast while you have the time. Don’t stop.” Didn’t It Rain is a perfect album, and this song haunts me still, as does the way Jason’s work was cut short.
Eiren Caffall: St. Michael
I made a lot of records, but the one I made after my divorce was the last one I finished and released. It is full of water, of glaciers and oceans and the obsessions with ecosystems and bodies that animate my memoir. For a long time, I wouldn’t write about my disease except in the oblique metaphors available in songwriting. I was writing about mourning, about mourning nature and my health and my dying family, but I was hiding it. It was a family tradition to obscure our disease. I became an adult when I could still be denied health insurance in this country because of my preexisting condition. After diagnosis and college, I was uninsured for four years. We hid our disease because if we revealed it, we could lose work, love, friends, insurance. Until the late stages, it was invisible. We could pass. We used the privileges of passing. Writing about it was terrifying, so I passed as an artist too. But there was still hope, and the working through of fear, and when I listen back to this song, I remember all of that and I feel like I was sending myself a message, a reminder that when I let go of fear, I soar.
Fats Waller: Hold Tight
After my accident on the island, I was told I couldn’t drive my car back to Chicago. My mother came up to Maine on the bus and met us so we could go back to the island and get our things, then start the drive home. My mother and I had some struggles, and it wasn’t always possible to lean on her when things fell apart. But while I waited for her to arrive, still dizzy and exhausted from the hospital, I sang this lullaby about fish to my kid, the same one she’d sung to me.
Crosby, Stills and Nash: Southern Cross
My friend Martha flew to New England and scooped us up to drive us home. As we crossed New York State—heading into a part of my life where I stopped passing, where I started telling everyone how my illness was progressing, how my divorce had hollowed me out financially and physically, how my creative life had been gutted by all of it—we listened to this song. All three of us in my crappy car on the expressway sang the lyrics at the top of our voices, “I have my ship/and all her flags are a-flying/she is all that I have left/and music is her name!”
Richard Buckner: William and Emily
Once home, it took me about two years to repair from the accident, physically and spiritually. But the financial part took longer, and my community had a fundraiser for me. They called it Parachute Among Anchors, based on the lyrics of one of my songs. As that help healed my material life and the doctors began to repair my body, I decided that I might be strong enough to date again. I met Andy, my weird twin, another only child who had been through a tough start, another lonely weirdo who had read the Mabinogian in a bedroom in Atlanta while I was reading the same book in my bedroom in Massachusetts. We got married in a warehouse loft on the south side in a snowstorm, and we walked down the aisle with my kid to this song. Richard Buckner’s music was one of my on-ramps to an artist’s life, and it felt good to hear this song of his, about the way we are connected to those we love after death, as we ushered in a new period of joy.
Califone: All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn how to mourn. I was born into a flooding body, in a flooding family, on a flooding world, and for a long time it felt like that would drown me in grief. I didn’t know how to survive my own diagnosis or my own life, so it seemed impossible, once I began writing about the natural world straight on, not just in oblique lyrics, to know how to survive what I was reporting in the ecosystem. I had to learn how to move from grief to mourning. I had to learn that the idea of grief that I learned, the five steps that move in a linearly to a predictable resolution, was imperfect as a way to understand the spiraling nature of grief, the constant return to stages you thought you’d finished, the endless nature of it. I had to learn how to move into mourning. Grief is a private and individual experience. It never really leaves. It is that spiral. Mourning is something else, public, communal, shared and sometimes full of ritual and context. When done in public, it includes so much joy, so much optimism. That is the joy and optimism I’ve had to cultivate as I write about dying ecosystems. Some of them will die. But like me, some of them will live long and well with incurable conditions, thriving, maybe not as a picture of perfect health, but as alive, evolving places. I’ve come to see that that is as valid as our culture’s expectation that we achieve perfection, mostly because we fear death. I’ve come to believe that we need to be ready to mourn together all the time as part of embracing life. I’ve come to think of myself as a funeral singer. I’ve come to think of all my friends and collaborators as funeral singers, too. We are here, singing in the face of the worst things in the world.
Mountain Goats: Quito
“When I get off the wheel/I’m going to stop/and make amends to everyone I’ve wounded,” Darnielle sings. And I sing along with it every day lately. This song about the wheel of life, the way we return to it, the round of death and rebirth and how to feel connected to god in the face of loss. I adore it. It is what I reach for every day, as the planet warms, and fires burn, and floods arrive, as my illness marches on, and my kid may or may not have it too. I sing it in the face of the loss of my parents, my aunts and uncles, musician friends who have gone too soon. “I’ll wave my magic wand/and those who’ve slipped the surly bonds/will rise like salmon at the spawning.” May we all rise like salmon at the spawning.
EIREN CAFFALL is a writer and musician based in Chicago. Her writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV Fire, forthcoming in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. She received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Row House Publishing will release her first book and memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, in 2024, and her novel, All the Water in the World, is slated for release by St. Martin’s Press in early 2025.