REVIEW | ‘VESSELS’

When Iowa graduate Daniel Raeburn met his wife at a party, he was stuck in an extended adolescence, as he describes in his debut non-fiction work, 'Vessels”: 'I was thirty-two years old ... and I still went everywhere on my bicycle. I collected comic books ... Weekends weren't easy.”

He never wanted to get married, to have kids. But Bekah was different. 'Of all the women I've ever met, she's the first one who felt like family.”

But there were difficulties with their pregnancies, and time and again they lost the baby, including once at nine months, where Bekah was forced to deliver a still birth.

These heartbreaks and complications made Bekah 'feel like I'm a vessel.”

And while Raeburn's memoir, which grew out of a New Yorker essay, is focused on their struggles to build a family, it's also a moving exploration of two people growing up and growing together. Raeburn explores the people he and Bekah were when they were younger, and the people they are becoming as they age. They are artists - Raeburn a writer, Bekah a potter - but Bekah doesn't define herself as an artist anymore, opening up larger questions of who you are when you are not who you used to be.

Had Raeburn simply focused on his and his wife's tragedies - and triumphs - 'Vessels” may have been too depressing to bear; but by balancing their trials against the backdrop of everyday life - from job interviews to house parties to awkward holidays with families - we can see the full power that comes from the long, complicated sentence that is life: 'I knew I'd live again. Be normal. It was unthinkable, and inevitable.”