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Sabrina Reeves Chronicles Alcoholism and Dementia in a Sobering Debut Novel
In a Q&A about ‘Little Crosses’, the Montreal author talks about her mother's devastating battle with alcohol dependency and memory loss, and the struggles of caregiving / BY Kim Hughes / March 14th, 2024
Mother-daughter relationships are fraught at the best of times. Add alcohol, dementia and outsize personalities, and the stage is set for high drama, grief and, if you’re lucky, some kind of redemption. Such is the backdrop for Little Crosses, the exceptionally readable debut novel from American-born, Montreal-based actor-cum-author Sabrina Reeves, based on her experiences with her late mother, Nini Reeves, who died in 2020 at age 77.
When we meet Little Crosses narrator Cassie Wolfe in early 2018, she and brothers Jack and Oliver are attempting to get their elderly, late-stage alcoholic mother Nina into detox, a necessary step toward getting legal guardianship and placing her in assisted living. But the once-vibrant, now-combative Nina likes being drunk, as alcoholics do. That state is compounded by her encroaching dementia; she’s not going into detox peacefully. The long and ferocious battle for dominance begins.
After the major opening sequence at an Albuquerque hospital, the book shifts backward 40 years, as Cassie recalls growing up with the artistic and mercurial Nina. Her towering presence — not to mention her ability to wield tools as she designs intricate houses — enormously influenced her three children, but Nina began to crumble after the death of a beloved partner. Little Crosses then progresses forward chronologically, traversing through Massachusetts and New York, finally landing back at its dramatic opening and offering the reader a widescreen view of the situation. The title is a reference to makeshift, hillside monuments, widely seen throughout the southwest, marking violent, unexpected deaths “that leave ghosts.”
Reeves, 55, is especially dexterous with dialogue, which she credits to her background as an actor. (She founded the Toronto-based, interdisciplinary performance collective bluemouth inc.) Her prose is equally evocative: “The road is wet, and beyond the waterfall the sky is an upside-down rocket popsicle, reddish pink at the bottom fading into white and then blue and getting lighter by the minute,” she writes.
The path to its publication is almost as interesting as the book: Little Crosses began as a journal, before morphing into Reeves’ thesis as she was completing her MFA in creative writing at Montreal’s Concordia University. With the prodding of her husband, David Usher (the lead singer-songwriter of ’90s-era alt-rock combo Moist), Reeves began shaping her novel.
In February 2022, at the suggestion of a friend, she submitted her manuscript to one of the submission windows opened by Toronto’s House of Anansi Press for writers seeking a publisher. It was accepted, and comes out March 19. (Toronto readers can join Reeves at Type Books, 883 Queen St. W., on March 27 at 7 p.m. for a local launch.)
In her first interview about Little Crosses – which features a painting by the author’s mother on the cover – Reeves tells Zoomer that, while the book is autobiographical, its status as fiction allowed her to play with timeframes and reconfigure characters in a way a more rigidly constructed memoir would not. It still meant mining her own life for material, an unnerving endeavour.
Kim Hughes: Did you have any trepidation about putting this very emotional, fact-based story out into the world?
Sabrina Reeves: I did. But the experience I had with bluemouth inc. had always been personal. Even pieces that my mother saw when she was well, that were about her or about my brothers, but out of context and reworked into something else, she was supportive of. I think she would have loved the idea of a book being written about her, but not necessarily want this out there [laughs]. I am always trying to go toward something that feels authentic. When you’re writing it’s very personal. You feel connected to the material but not the people who will be reading it. When it goes out there, that’s when it feels vulnerable.
KH: Your mother suffered from dementia?
SR: Yes, fully and completely.
KH: Alcoholism too?
SR: That was also firsthand. My mother was such a great woman, so artistic and a force of nature. It was like, ‘How did this happen?’ It felt very sudden but when you look back, you’re like ‘Oh yeah, she did always have wine with dinner.’ In hindsight, you could see it coming, but when it came in the last two or three years [of her life], it was a descent we couldn’t imagine. All the aspects of the end stage of alcoholism are grim and unbelievable.
The book is pretty much exactly what happened. I was documenting things which I’m glad of, as our memories tend to block out the unpleasant things. I would never have remembered much of that stuff. Myself and my two brothers tried, literally, everything we could do to help her. There were no lingering questions of what else we might have done. So, the documenting proved valuable to me in a personal way.
KH: Why not issue this story as a memoir instead of a novel?
SR: As I understood it, memoirs must be 100 per cent true. I really wanted to craft something that was moving forward with causality – moving like a novel – and there were all these things I wanted to explore with prose. In the original draft that I defended for my thesis, for example, my mother had six different friends in New Mexico, but it was too hard to follow all these secondary characters. So, I amalgamated them into one character. And when, in the first chapter I went to get her for detox, her horrific boyfriend was there, and there was a big battle in the parking lot. But I didn’t want to introduce him at that point. I extracted him from that scene and had him show up later. So, while the essential material is true, there have been a lot of little changes. You’d get called out for doing that in a memoir.
KH: Did you consider blurring other biographical details? For example, like you, Cassie lives in Montreal with a musician husband …
SR: When I started writing it for my thesis, I didn’t really know the difference between memoir and autofiction and I wasn’t quite sure where this would fall. I went into the program with this young adult project in mind. It was very complex and based on Jungian archetypes, but at that point, forgive me, the shit was hitting the fan.
I was literally juggling going to my seminars and going out to New Mexico every few weeks to deal with my mother, taking care of my [two] kids and documenting in my journal. It was devastating. And it was David who said, ‘Why are you working on this young adult thing that has nothing to do with anything when you have all this material and you’re not using it.’ In that moment, I said, ‘You’re right.’
KH: Was there ever any question of who the narrator should be?
SR: That’s the biggest thing I struggled with. At one point I tried to put the book in Nina’s voice, but I just couldn’t get it. I also had full sections written in Jack’s and Oliver’s voices, but something wasn’t working.
KH: Who is your hoped-for audience with this book?
SR: Women, certainly. And people who have gone through intense caregiving. In the process of writing, I came to realize that, with alcoholism, many people are dealing with it directly or indirectly – with themselves or with family members – and not talking about it. As with anything that makes you ‘less than your best self,’ it’s not discussed. I left some stuff out, but I felt that the book had to go to a certain level to speak to people caregiving those with alcoholism or dementia. And if I were to dilute it, it just wouldn’t speak to them.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.