The Day Daddy's Girl Had To Grow Up

Jennifer Handford, The Light of Hidden Flowers

“I had aced every test I had ever taken, but I had also failed to grow up, and of that fact, I was now suddenly keenly aware. I was smart, but I wasn’t wise. I had clung to my role as my father’s child.” (Page 49)

I sometimes complain that books tell me what to think or feel, but rarely do they contain something so akin to a thesis statement as the above quote. As protagonist Melissa “Missy” Fletcher faces her steadfast father’s apparently sudden senility, she realizes she has accomplished little in life. It isn’t a dawning realization from evidence, either. She has a divine afflatus so abrupt, one suspects she knows she’s a character in a novel.

This novel commences on Missy’s thirty-fifth birthday. She insists she doesn’t work for her father, a successful financial planner in Richmond, Virginia; she’s a full partner in the family business. The mere fact that Dad’s the company’s public face, while Missy handles market forecasts, mundane paperwork, and other behind-the-scenes tedium, doesn’t make her inferior. Anyway, she keeps telling herself that, and by implication, us.

But one sunny morning, Frank Fletcher, pillar of Richmond’s financial community, forgets his well-rehearsed banter. A seemingly insignificant “senior moment” marks the beginning of a pattern, as memory slips, blown judgement calls, and getting lost become remarkably common. It takes 100 pages for a neurologist to confirm it, but don’t worry, the dust-flap synopsis spoils the reveal: Dad has Alzheimer’s disease. Missy has never felt so alone.

With postponed adulthood suddenly thrust upon her, Missy doesn’t know what comes next. She’s dating a handsome but uninspiring tax analyst across town. He’s asked her to marry, but she dithers, because he’s so plain-vanilla (literally so: vanilla ice cream is about the only thing he gets excited for). I can’t fault Missy’s ambivalence. She’s a foodie, he enjoys TGIFriday’s and tap water. She wants to visit Italy, he considers Yellowstone an adventure.

Missy grasps the hypocrisy in this judgement, though. She chose her college and career specifically to keep close to her father and hometown. Despite longing to visit Italy, the one time she attempted travelling anywhere, paralyzing fear forced her off the airplane; her bags went to Florence, she stayed home. (This is Missy’s only deeply investigated fear, but she misconstrues even this. Since panic struck before takeoff, I think she fears, not flying, but travelling.)

Jennifer Handford

Most tellingly, Missy Facebook-stalks her high school boyfriend. She admires his glamorous wife and three handsome children. Because Joe selectively curates his life, though, we know what she doesn’t: Joe’s wife has left him, he lost one leg in Afghanistan, and his daughter suffers major depression with suicidal ideation. Wait, he’s getting divorced while she’s contemplating loveless marriage? Which character will crack and divulge the truth first?

Perhaps we’re supposed to consider Missy an unreliable narrator. Though she spends chapter after chapter reminding us how homely, geeky, and uninspiring she is, occasional chapters told from Joe’s viewpoint stress Missy as elegant, beautiful, and awesome Missy is. Though Joe is unhappily married and raising emo kids, he’s clearly paused his heart, waiting for Missy to return. Anyone who’s reconnected with their high-school crush in their thirties cringes inwardly.

I make fun, but there’s a decent coming-of-age story underneath Handford’s authorial baggage. As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, adulthood isn’t a matter of turning twenty-one or whatever, it’s about taking possession of your own life. Just because Missy doesn’t start doing that until she’s thirty-five doesn’t make it less meaningful. Today’s generation knows that technology, economics, and other forces often force “adults” to continue living like kids for years.

Sadly, when I mention Handford’s authorial baggage, there’s lots of that. She overextends Missy’s adolescent hand-wringing well beyond necessity. It takes too long to reach Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, especially since we already know it’s coming. Then the disease progresses so quickly, we feel pity, not empathy. Her romantic life has more red flags than a Soviet parade. We, the readers, desperately want Missy to get out of her own way and do, well, anything.

One wonders, reading this novel, whether any editor anywhere, at any point, took Handford’s manuscript and said, “You need to have characters act, not narrate.” We know Handford has the ability to write with telling detail, because she describes financial documents and dinner preparations with exquisite specificity. She just doesn’t use such skills on human interactions. Handford, through Missy, holds her audience at arm’s length. In the end, I just got bored.