Review: This Familiar Heart by Babette Fraser Hale

About the book, This Familiar Heart

Genre: Memoir / Relationships / Aging / Grief
Publisher: Winedale Publishing
Date of Publication: April 2, 2024
Number of Pages: 312 pages

In this intimate rendering of a relationship, we learn how deceptive surface impressions can be.

Leon Hale, author of Bonney’s Place, was sixty years old, a “country boy” who wrote about rural Texans with humor and sensitivity in his popular column for The Houston Post and, later the Houston Chronicle. Babette Fraser at thirty-six was a child of privilege, a city girl educated abroad, struggling in her career while raising a young son. No one thought it could work.

Even Hale himself held serious doubts. But it did endure. The interior congruencies they discovered through a long and turbulent courtship knit them tightly together for the rest of his life.

And when he died during the Pandemic isolation period, searing levels of grief and doubt threatened Babette’s understanding of the partnership and marriage that had sustained her for forty years. Had he really been the person she thought he was? Had he kept secrets that would forever change her view of him?

In candid, evocative prose, she explores the distorted perceptions that often follow the death of a cherished spouse, and the loving resolution that allows life to go on.

Buy, read, and discuss this book:

Amazon | TAMU Press | Goodreads

Watch the Trailer for This Familiar Heart

About the author, Babette Fraser Hale

Babette Fraser Hale is the author of A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, 2022 winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have received notice from Best American Short Stories, 2015 and the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review. In addition to writing fiction, Babette has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor, and publisher. She lives in Texas.

Connect with Babette:

Blog | Goodreads | Facebook | Amazon

My Thoughts

Reviewing memoirs – especially deeply personal stories like This Familiar Heart – can be tricky. Too easily we fall into the habit of judging the life and choices presented to us. But this isn’t fiction, and cannot be examined the same way.

If this book were fiction, it would be an amazing story. The characters are erudite and earthy at once, and the pace of this love story is perfect. The author draws you in as her tale goes spiraling from a letter to meeting to several more encounters, to sex and love and a partnership that is ended by death and grief.

But since this book, this story, is a memoir, I won’t talk more about the events, but rather the way author Babette Fraser Hale has chosen to present them, which she has done beautifully.

I loved the way she told her origin story with the man who preferred to be called “Hale,” rather than his first name, as a creative non-fiction exercise, interspersed with her notes from the perspective of “after.” The noted are italicized so you cannot mistake them for the narrative, but they do more than add future knowledge. They color the narrative with all the years, experiences, and feelings since the initial occurrences.

Babette’s (I use her first name to distinguish her from the Hale she writes about) language is also beautiful, full of evocative phrases like, “The day spreads out around them as they walk,” or “His mouth and tongue study her body, but it is in no way enough, and it is also too much,” and “We have been erased, as completely as our house itself, or more completely, perhaps.”

This is the kind of writing that inspires me to wander around the house reading passages aloud to my husband, the dogs, myself – it doesn’t matter. This is the kind of writing that sits with you, long after you’ve finished.

So, while this story, which begins with two people falling in love and ends with love torn apart, covers some decidedly not-beautiful details – death is never pretty – the book itself is beautiful. And brilliant.

Goes well with: canned soup and candlelight.

Visit the Other Great Blogs on This Tour

Click to visit the Lone Star Literary Life Tour Page for This Familiar Heart for direct links to each post on this tour, updated daily, or visit each blog directly.

04/16/24	Jennie Reads	Review
04/16/24	Hall Ways Blog	BONUS Stop
04/17/24	Chapter Break Book Blog	Book Trailer
04/17/24	LSBBT Blog	BONUS Stop
04/18/24	The Real World According to Sam	Review
04/19/24	Book Fidelity	Review
04/20/24	It’s Not All Gravy	Review
04/21/24	StoreyBook Reviews	Excerpt
04/22/24	Bibliotica	Review
04/23/24	Boys’ Mom Reads	Review
04/24/24	Carpe Diem Chronicles	Review
04/25/24	The Plain-Spoken Pen	Review