Guest post: Twisted Up

When the mother of my friend Stuart Connelly died some years ago, her cremains were tucked into her youngest child’s closet and promptly forgotten until Stuart’s wife’s insisted he lay his mother to rest. What were Mom’s wishes? his wife wanted to know. Stuart had no clue. To find out, he hit the road with a banker box filled with family artifacts and a box of ashes, hoping to learn just enough about his mother to answer that question.

In his new memoir—out this month in time for this (waning) month of mothers– Stuart finds himself performing a series of increasingly uncomfortable errands in search of the story: knocking on people’s doors, asking to see the basement where one of his relations died; walking into police stations to inquire about fifty-year-old cold cases; and asking an old family friend if he and mom were in fact more than just friends. The book is called Offered In Secret, and I’ll let him take it from here.

— Joe D’Agnese

Twisted Up

Stuart Connelly

A huge number of TV viewers have gotten themselves in a tailspin over Sugar, a current streamer on Apple TV+ about an LA-based private detective. Without going into details that might give away story and plot, let’s simply say that the love the show initially garnered grew out of its wonderful execution of the noir trope of the lone, noble investigator refusing to give up the case, no matter what. The disappointment and backlash came with a mid-series twist that radically altered this basic conception.

I get it. The show was solidly satisfying without the damn twist. But I also think it’s important to interrogate the idea that mysteries, which by their very nature are supposed to be complex, speak to us because the elements are in fact predictable. Not the specifics, but the story beats.

The idea that the powerful, well-respected community leader is behind the nefarious deeds, or that the person who hired the detective did so to get him looking in the wrong direction… These are not twists, they are hallmarks. We read and watch to see how the dots are connected, not to be surprised that the dots exist in the first place. I describe the show as satisfying rather than great or exciting or intricate for exactly this reason.

Cover found in his mother’s personal effects
is a rare photo of Stuart’s parents together
that does not show either person’s face.

Even the inevitable defeated-hero, Chinatown-style endings of so many detective stories don’t disappoint, because we the audience can see how the insurmountable forces all lock together, how the case was doomed from the jump. Again, there can be satisfaction without attendant happiness. At least there’s no confusion.

We like a bow tied around the mystery; we don’t like surprises that upend the format.

I recently published a memoir, Offered In Secret, in which I became a reluctant detective in my own real life story. And if there was any bow at the end, let’s say that if it was tied at all, it was a slipknot.

You could say mine was a missing person case, although I knew where the woman was: in a box in the passenger seat, melted down to a few pounds of powdered residue. I was searching for a relationship with my mother inwardly while I was searching for a burial site for what remained of her exterior. I had a paltry number of letters and photos and telegrams and newspaper clippings she had saved. As I read and analyzed these, I drove 1,800 miles in search of memories to connect the two of us. This would seem straightforward enough, but I uncovered secrets in my mother’s life I couldn’t have conceived as a fiction writer. I connected dots that I didn’t even know were there.

Looking into my divorced mother’s friend, who was at the time an international student half her age, I dug up some surprising information.

Tapan, Mother, at Montreal Biosphere

From the book:

[A]mong my mother’s keepsakes, there was a photo of the [Montreal] Biosphere site after all. This one was taken less than eight years after the World’s Fair visit. (I could date the picture because in May of 1976 the Biosphere caught fire and its Plexiglas shell melted away, leaving only the naked metal superstructure). It should serve nicely as the introduction to a new character in the Carolyn Connelly drama: meet Tapan Sarkar.

At the time this photograph was snapped, the man in question was a Syracuse University electrical engineering student. It seemed that there were more surviving photos of Tapan with my mother than me with her. Certainly more than my father with her. There was a slew of other pictures of the man from India in Carolyn’s possession when she died, shots of him throughout the years, but no matter when the shot was taken, the age difference between the two was always apparent. He may have actually been closer to my age than my mother’s.

Tapan had been a fixture of my childhood. He was a gentleman friend of Carolyn’s who, I’d slowly begun to realize, had a much larger footprint in Carolyn’s life than I ever realized.

I’d known from the start that this work, this thing I was planning on writing, was a feathered fish: half memoir, half investigation. Those can be very different pursuits, but what I knew they had in common was the fact that they both were narratives that had to be wrestled into shape. They both were bits and pieces that needed assembly. Both puzzles.

Tapan Sarkar was a puzzle piece that I hadn’t placed on the board yet. I’d never even been able to gauge the general location. He wasn’t a corner, an edge, part of the sky or bit of the horizon. No, Tapan was one of those off-putting puzzle pieces with the splashes of strange colors shot through so incongruous that you don’t believe it forms any part of the picture and you suspect it might belong to a different puzzle altogether.

Until something clicks it into place and you can suddenly see the bigger picture.

That bigger picture was an answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked. When I got the chance to verify it by asking the new question, the answer didn’t match the one I’d pieced together. There was no great confession, no peek behind the curtain. No satisfaction.

But there was discovery. What I discovered was that real life has more twists than connect-the-dots. They may not be as game changing as the twists that Hollywood contrives, but they’re more reliable and beautiful in their messiness.

What’s great about the detective as an archetype is that they are us. They come to the world of the story from the outside in media res (like us), without knowing any of the players, causes, or effects (like us), and struggle to puzzle it all out so it makes sense. We crave in our fiction a sense of order that we can’t get in the world itself. What I suggest is that looking for order in the id-choked chaos of crime is unnatural; there is a beauty in the chaos itself.

Now, this Apple TV+ show may not be playing fair, with a twist that strikes viewers like a grenade lobbed from a different story (perhaps even a different genre). That’s a valid concern. But let’s fight against bringing our rigid conventions to the people we’re asking to hear stories from. If Offered In Secret is any genre, it’s a road trip. And the one thing we all know about a road trip is this hoary truism: it’s about the journey, not the destination.

Why not take the ride? Take some time to enjoy and soak in the subversive, more questions-than-answers tension of Twin Peaks, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, or the more recent I Saw The TV Glow?

And maybe give the new detective show that’s annoying everyone a second chance.

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See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com