Book Review : Elle Nash - Deliver Me (2023)
If you want to see people lose their motherfucking minds, start a conversation about motherhood. Although we consider ourselves evolved and sophisticated, nuclear family is a trait we share with all mammals of the Earth and motherhood is the most inescapable role. Because only women are endowed to have kids, therefore share normally stronger bonds with their offspring. As a consequence, traditional motherhood tends to be idealized. Sometimes to a fault, like in Elle Nash's soul crushing new novel Deliver Me.
Deliver Me tells the story of Dee Dee, a young woman working a grueling job at a slaughterhouse to support her precarious situation with her boyfriend Daddy. But Dee Dee wants nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mother and take care of her family like so many women from the Ozarks, where she’s from. There's a certain status and sense of purpose she idealizes in motherhood. But no one around her thinks she's up to the task. Not Daddy or her mom. Not even her friend Sloane who she worships. Dee Dee is alone with her dream.
Motherhood, Religion and the Purgatory of the Ozarks
This had to be one of the darkest, most depressing things I've read this year. I don’t mean that as a criticism, but I don't think Deliver Me is going to get mainstream traction because of that unless it gets picked up by Netflix or something. But it totally should. I'm a sucker for characters struggling with a problem they can't solve (at least not on their own) and Dee Dee is exactly that. She lives in conservative, quite religious region where women have a well-defined place in society, but it's somehow inaccessible to her.
The reasons why motherhood is inaccessible to Dee Dee is that she's largely given up on. Both Daddy and his mother perceive her to be an incapable fuck up who kills everything she touches, which is only kind of unfair as an assessment. Dee Dee is a mess, but her job, miscarriages, the pressures of supporting a good for nothing boyfriend and her judgemental-ass mom made her who she is. She's a product of her environment or, at least, Dee Dee's own assessment of the situation leads you to believe so.
It's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. Did Dee Dee alienate everyone in her life by being incapable of doing anything right or did the unbearable fucking tensions in her life destroyed her mind and body. It is absolutely gut wrenching and heart breaking to read Dee Dee's attempt to belong and fit in this Judeo-Christian life model only to get berated for not already fitting. She does a lot of fucked up shit throughout Deliver Me, but the worse things she does are to herself. I’m telling you, it gets unruly at some point.
If you got unresolved issues about unhealthy pregnancy and miscarriage, MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING. I don’t usually do those, but I would've loved to have one going it myself!
The Places God Forgot About
Dee Dee works in a slaughterhouse. A place of death that kills between 40 000 and 50 000 chicken a day. Some of them aren't older than 50 days. It's an unbearably ironic for a young woman who’s so passionate about babies and giving life, but it was inevitable. She's an unskilled young worker with little to no education in a region that features limited employment opportunities who doesn't have any proper help to support herself. Dee Dee's fate feels inevitable. That's why it hurts so much to read it unfold.
I know what you're gonna say. Isn't it all a little misery porn-y, Ben? A little bit, not really. There's not a lot of light in Dee Dee's life, except the one she creates for herself. It is often a sick, rotten light, but it's her own way to cope with her oppressive environment. Her bubbly persona and naiveté generate that light for better or worse, but it fosters a powerful connection between the reader and Dee Dee. She's a simple soul that could live her happily ever after with very little, but she lives in a place God forgot about.
*
I did not expect Deliver Me to hit me this fucking hard. A pregnancy story in the middle of an Ozarks setting shouldn't work as well as it does, but Elle Nash creates a profound bond with her fundamentally flawed character, a product of unspoken, common tragedy that seems to only breed more tragedy around her. I do think it's too visceral and intense to get major success, but Deliver Me could very well turn into a cult hit and get that television adaptation down the line. Uncompromising talents tend to find their audience.
