The Ties that Bind: Deni Y. Béchard’s Cures for Hunger delivers a powerful bildungsroman about distraught lineage, rootlessness, and the invention of personal identity
5 out of 5 stars
The Ties that Bind: Deni Y. Béchard’s Cures for Hunger delivers a powerful bildungsroman about distraught lineage, rootlessness, and the invention of personal identity
by Evan Giannobile
Deni Y. Béchard’s memoir Cures for Hunger catalogs the search for identity through alienated connections to the past, plucking the resonant and often dark strings which inextricably join the lives of parents and children. Desperate to understand his own motivations and drives, Deni Béchard relies on uncovering the history and true character of his father, Andre Béchard, to help untangle his own identity in a vivid narrative of discovery, longing, and unknown family histories.
Published by the local institution Milkweed Editions, Béchard’s new memoir has been extolled by critics as a hard-earned and honest lyrical exploration into the dynamics of a dysfunctional family and the residue left behind. Having previously won the Commonwealth Prize with his first novel Vandal Love, Béchard now delves into the complicated relationship with his father: a compulsive, criminally-minded, freedom-seeking man who for Béchard had always occupied the fragile space between fear, disgust and admiration. Cures for Hunger is beautifully written and was listed on Amazon Canada as this year’s best nonfiction book, and Milkweed Editions is publishing the first American edition of Vandal Love as well as Cures for Hunger.
Throughout the narrative, the expectations of his parents are juxtaposed with his own desires. Upon moving back with his father, he must argue endlessly to even finish high school. To his father, books and writing are merely lazy and unproductive hobbies, and Deni’s ambition to learn overshadows his father, even in death. Yet with the constant tension between his mother and father, young Deni is exposed to the various sides of his father, much to his confusion. His adventurousness, his cunning, his charisma, yet beneath those aspects flow a strong undercurrent of violence, anger, disappointment, and alienation.
The memoir is characterized by a highly descriptive style; fluid prose paints vivid physical and emotional landscapes. As the family disintegrates, the numerous separations and reunions of his life are complimented by an equally staggering change in scenery, from the lush green valleys and lonely snow-capped mountains of his youth in British Colombia, to the decayed and poverty-ridden trailer parks of Virginia, to the wind-swept childhood of his father in St. Lawrence. As his character develops, he recognizes the beauty in his father’s relentless hunger for excitement and freedom, yet this admiration is always paired with a clear-cut disdain and fear passed down by his mother’s and his own weariness.
Ultimately, the story is a testament to the ways tendencies and shortcomings of parents bleed onto their children via hushed arguments heard through thin walls, the stale, repeated arguments absorbed, and the unpredictability of a dysfunctional family. For Béchard, these childhood experiences must be translated with care into a form of adult understanding. Born into a lineage of dissatisfaction, self-destruction, and self-preservation, the mysterious life of his father becomes the key to Deni Y. Béchard’s discovery of himself, and ultimately his place in or outside of society.
