My Goodreads and Amazon review of Fire Exit by Morgan Talty (Rated 5) – Identity Crises. Fire Exit by Morgan Talty argues that we are all entitled to know our past, even if the truth is disorienting. Learning the whole story may fill in missing parts or provoke unasked questions. In Fire Exit, the issue is especially fraught because it deals with identity, namely the right to claim Native American identity if, lurking unbeknownst to a child raised as a full Indian, is a father’s non-native identity. Charles, the protagonist, was raised on the Penobscot reservation by his non-native mother and Indian stepfather with full knowledge of his story. He feels his daughter, conceived with his high school Penobscot girlfriend and now fully grown, is entitled to hers. The girl’s mother and indigenous husband, who raised the girl as his own, object. Entangled in Charles’s urge to tell his daughter her blood story is that his own mother’s memory is growing porous with Alzheimer’s. Moreover, he’s plagued by guilt that preoccupation with the girls’ birth kept him from preventing his stepfather’s death decades earlier. Fire Exit is replete with grief, remorse, mental illness, alcoholism, and death. Yet, the novel is not wholly bleak and morbid. On the contrary, Talty’s ineradicable faith in filial devotion and commitment to personal history is ultimately uplifting. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire his refusal to shy away from difficult subjects with debatable answers. Fire Exit will make readers question their own stories. Warning: The choice not to know the truth comes at a price.
The benefits and costs of unknown identity
Why writers read: “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham
