Local book review: If Only You People Could Follow Directions

If Only You People Could Follow Directions
Jessica Hendry Nelson
(Counterpoint Press, 2013, 256 pp.)

We can’t escape our pasts — this is something we all know, or at least should know, even in moments of flight. 

In Jessica Hendry Nelson’s debut memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions, she accepts fleeing as a way of processing and nurturing, as “a moment’s pardon from all that has passed and all that is to come.”

Nelson’s story of family and addiction begins in Philadelphia. The intertwined essays are a rove through her most intimate relationships. Her family, nuclear and chosen, is a mix of strong women and addicted men: a father who loses his battle with alcoholism, a brother who drifts in out and out of rehab and a best friend who is always stealing prescriptions and disappearing. 

Running after them are Nelson, her mother and her grandmother, who all persist, albeit wearily, to help these men who struggle to help themselves.   

Nelson takes us through the streets of Philadelphia — Woody’s, West Philly, the suburbs — to New Hampshire for college, New York City where she escapes and fails, Scotland and ultimately Vermont where she stays and heals. 

There is a struggle to find balance, love and new beginnings amidst all she’s been through and all that lingers. Nelson’s voice is assertive and meaningful, with moments of wry wit and despair. 

She layers her experiences so aptly — a blackface ewe that has fallen to its death juxtaposed with her father falling down a staircase to his own demise — and her refreshing style makes the essays meld together with grace and fluidity. At the crux is unconditional love for both family and self, and underneath that, the tenacious will to prevail.