Pre-Order MARIGOLD her (Officially Out on March 11)
Marigolds bloom from September to the first frost. Then they die and return to the soil, where they wait for the next September sun.
79% of the suicides in the United States in 2014 were committed by men. It adds up to roughly 33,000 deaths. I don't have the numbers for other years, but I'm sure they're similar. There are easy explanations for these statistics: men like to remain in control of their fate, they're less afraid of death. These are just the things we like to tell ourselves when clutching a shotgun and a magnum of Jack Daniel's. Choosing death is a more complicated and intimate decision. It is often the result of severe mental illness. It is my sincere belief that fiction exists to discuss problems that don't have any answer and Troy James Weaver's newest book Marigold goes down the dark and winding road of depression and death.
The narrator of Marigold is at the crossroads. He wants to find the will to live or the courage to die. He's earning a living selling flowers to people having either the best or the worst day of their lives. He seldom ponders about the things that brought him pain before, but he's retracted inside himself so long also, nothing really gets to him anymore. Not angry clients. Not even his wife, who might as well be living behind a wall. Marigold is the story of his quiet struggle to stay alive, feel alive when everything around him is dimming. It's a sober, impressionistic and damn accurate portrait of depression.
Marigold wasn't what I thought it would be. If you'll allow me a military metaphor, it's about occupation more than it is about invasion. The narrator isn't overrun with the futility of existence over the course of the book, he affirms his desire to die on page one. So it doesn't take the obvious sexy existential angle, but deals with the raw and ugly reality of depression and the empty, nihilistic nature of adulthood instead. It has to be one of the most brutal and terrifying books that doesn't feature any violence or murders whatsoever.
Part of that I believe is the byzantine yet efficient structure that makes the reader feel like he's trapped in the narrator's mind. Troy James Weaver doesn't write chapters in Marigold. He writes paragraphs, sometimes sentences or words. Jumps from a subject to another. Subjects the reader to the violence of the narrator's depression. Writing such a vibrant and honest book about depression could've went sideways lots of time, but the shapeless and suffocating form made Marigold an unrelenting and memorable read.
I'm surprised to have found so much to say about Marigold, to be honest. Troy James Weaver has this talent for knocking the eloquence out of me. I finished the book in two frenzied sittings, curled up in a ball, trying to shield off a tidal wave of bad memories. That doesn't seem pleasant, doesn't it? I assure you that it was. Not all books are meant to be escapism. If the highest calling of literature is to connect human beings together, Marigold lives up to its highest standard. It definitely made me feel less alone.