The Other Side of Disappearing, by Kate Clayborn

Once again, it was the title and cover combination that caught my eye; I didn’t noticed the author’s name until I had read the blurb, and by then it was a given I would request an ARC: true crime podcast and road trip romance? Gimme!

Beware: parental abandonment; mental health issues; suicide; explicit sex on page; cancer.

The Other Side of Disappearing, by Kate Clayborn

Having heard other readers sing Ms Clayborn’s praises, I had been gunshy about trying it myself. Hype, you see, far too often just doesn’t match my reading reality. And there’s the matter of narrative voice: alternating narration by the two main characters, in first person, present tense, is by far my least favorite.

The joke, of course, is on me: I was hooked from page two.

This is such a good book! It is a really good genre romance, but it’s also just such a good book, raising important issues, developing all the characters so well, without falling into the trap of preachily answering all the questions it raises.

The publisher’s blurb sets the story up thusly:

Hairstylist Jess Greene has spent the last decade raising her younger half-sister, Tegan—and keeping a shocking secret. Ever since their reckless mother ran off with a boyfriend she’d known only a few months, Jess has been aware that he’s the same accomplished con man who was the subject of a wildly popular podcast, The Last Con of Lynton Baltimore.

Now thirty-one, Jess didn’t bargain on Tegan eventually piecing together the connection for herself. But Tegan plans to do exactly what Jess has always feared—leave their safe, stable home to search for their mother—and she’ll be accompanied by the prying podcast host and her watchful, handsome producer, Adam Hawkins. Unwilling to let the sister she’s spent so much of her life protecting go it alone, Jess reluctantly joins them.

Together, the four make their way across the country, unraveling the mystery of where the couple disappeared to and why. But soon Jess is discovering other things too. Like a renewed sense of vulnerability and curiosity, and a willingness to expand beyond the walls she’s so carefully built. And in Adam, she finds an unexpected connection she didn’t even know was missing, if only she can let go and let him in . . .

From the first page, it’s obvious that there’s something off with Jess; it’s not only that she became the de facto single parent of her then-eight years old sister, when she herself was barely 21–though that is burden enough to put on someone so young. She is incredibly emotionally repressed; she essentially shut off her own life to take care of Tegan, the one person she loves. That’s it. Jess hasn’t even allowed room in her heart for her father, who did stay, who did love her, who took care of her–however begrudgingly.

Because when her mother abandoned *her*, Jess at least had had her father. Tegan, the product of that first adandonment, had no one–no one but Jess. Jess, who doesn’t know how to bend, because bending would have broken her ten years ago, and now, she can’t.

“I think of bending over, of setting my hands on my knees to recover. … I push my fingers through my hair, clasp them together on top of my head. Surely staying upright is better. Staying upright is what I’ve always done” (chapter 3)

That love for Tegan, fierce and absolute, hasn’t quite allowed for Tegan’s ultimate growth and independence; for the time when she won’t need Jess’s protection. Intellectually, Jess knows she needs to start letting go, but it’s been ten years of holding on with everything she is, for Tegan’s sake, and now she can’t really let go.

“When she paid attention to you–really paid attention to you, for however many moments you could catch her attention–you though you were the most important person in the world….I’ve spent so many years never talking to Tegan about how I feel about Mom that I don’t know how to start, and anyway, I don’t know if I should. It’s Tegan who hurts the most from what Mom did, not me.” (Jess, thinking about her mother, chapter 9)

Adam is immediately drawn to Jess, and from the first moment he feels her pain, despair and fear. He’s both disconcerted by the strength of his feelings toward her, and conflicted, because he too has a past, a history, and a reason to be there,

A former college football star who disconcerted everyone from family to fans by refusing to go pro, Adam has just gotten his degree in journalism; at thirty three, he’s finally starting the career he wants. For most of his life, most everyone around him–teachers, fellow students, the press–always considered him the ultimate “all brawn, no brain” athlete, and treated him accordingly. To this day, most people he meet automatically assume the same, including Jess.

“You must have loved football” “You’d think that. … I loved parts of it. But really, it was sort of that I was build for it, at least around these parts. When I was a kid, it was a given. I was tall from a young age. I put on muscle easily; I was fast. Of course I’d play football, everyone knew that. So I did.” (Jess, Adam, chapter 13)

Adam has deep scars from losing his closest friend to suicide a few years prior; the entire world watched Copeland Frederick struggle, and looked away. Because there’s a big, ever present stigma that says that suffering from any mental health issue is to have a weakness. And that kind of guy–a big, manly man performing manly men sports–can’t be weak.

Adam is determined to do a story about sports exploitation and abuse of young athletes, about how society is willingly complicit, trading so many young men’s health, mental and physical, for entertainment value. He needs to tell Cope’s story so that other young men know they’re not alone, that they don’t have to suffer in silence until there’s nothing left to give.

Adam has always been a very empathetic, perceptive and generous person, but with Jess it goes up a level. He wants to protect her from everything, including himself; he’s there to give Jess what she wants and needs, regardless of what he wants and needs. Which, of course, conflicts with the very reason he can be there for her: his job.

“Everything about me is too big right now. My body, my boss, my job. Most of all, my feelings for her.” (Adam, chapter 25)

I appreciated very much that while Jess’s and Adam’s relationship turns physical in just over a week, a lot of emotional work happens during those days. And it helps a lot that Jess gets to see Adam with his family, in the house he grew up in, helping her see that he is indeed the good man she perceives him to be.

“He kisses like Adam: this huge, hard slab of a man who is somehow the most gentle person I’ve ever met. … it is so fully the best kiss of my life that it must be the only kiss I’ve ever had, and I guess, in a way, it is–ten years since my last one, and ten years ago I was a different Jess. This kiss is a choice.” (Jess, chapter 15)

The other two characters in the story are seen exclusively through Adam’s and Jess’s eyes, and at first each of them focus on the one person they know best, so we see Tegan mostly as Jess sees her: so young, a teenager still; someone who needs to be protected from everything and everyone, and most of all, from their mother’s rashness.

But of course, being young doesn’t mean that Tegan doesn’t understand Jess or wants to protect her as much as Jess wants to protect her.

“I want to find my mom for my own sake, of course I do. … But I want to find her for Jess’s sake too. Because in a couple of months when I’m not home every day, when she doesn’t have me to take care of, I have a feeling that a bunch of stuff she’s ignored for a lot of years is going to catch up with her. … a person doesn’t hide five postcards in a freaking curtain rod if they have a healthy relationship to their trauma.” (Tegan, chapter 16)

For his part, Adam sees Salem Durant as the epitome of ethical journalism, while acknowledging that she has professional ambitions and personal goals tangled in this particular story. However, Salem is also a woman with a teenaged daughter and a husband who isn’t particularly thrilled to see her return to the Lyndon Baltimore story all these years later.

“Don’t ever get married…. I don’t mean that. And anyway, you’d never have this problem. No one’s saying anything about you going on a three-week business trip. No one would text you to ask where we keep the snack packs for recital days. No one would expect you to remember where the drop-off area is.” (Salem, chapter 10)

The focus of the narrative is on Jess and Adam, and the growing feelings between them, but there is also space given to both Tegan and her growth as a person, and, unexpectedly at first, Salem’s. Ms Clayborn is very clever in how these two emotional arcs are presented; Jess, after all, knows Tegan quite well, and as a teenager, she’s easier for Adam to read. Salem, however, is a grown person with a well-established professional reputation and Adam’s boss during this assignment; his understanding of her is limited, and she is almost entirely opaque to Jess at the beginning of the fateful road trip.

The events of the story cover just over a month, including a brief third act separation; I am on record saying that I’m not a fan of this narrative device, but I have to accept that sometimes it’s the right choice. This is one of those cases in which it works really well, because Jess, as Adam’s father put it, “has problems” that require her focusing on herself before she can be an equal part of a romantic relationship.

Aside: I’m stealing this quote, because, holy gog, truer words:

“Worrying about a hundred other things that have nothing to do with all this, because worrying is a runaway train.” (Adam, chapter 20)

Finally: I don’t believe I’ve ever cried before over an author’s aknowledgment that mentions readers (and bloggers) who ” take the time to post and share and review and participate in the reading community”, but I did here. Because I, too, am glad “we can all disappear together, for a little while, into the pages of the books we love.”

As I said at the top, this is a really good book, and a most excellent romance; my only complaint is the dearth of people of color, but given the main cast and that it’s a road trip, it makes sense.

The Other Side of Disappearing gets a 9.25 out o 10