If you lie down in a field, she will find you there

“Colleen Brown’s riveting memoir is a lyrical meditation on loss and an interrogation of a largely narrative genre that, despite its ascendency, has been relatively slow to change form. This tendency to hold form is analogous to Brown’s observation of how in death her mother’s life was hardboiled by the media and sold to the world as true crime. If You Lie Down is, to my mind, the finest debut since Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir and ranks with Annie Ernaux’s The Years as a life-changing event.”

“‘In memory, everything seems to happen to music.’ Tennessee Williams. Colleen Brown’s If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is a contemporary symphony of recollection, discovery, and acknowledgment of the things we think we knew but forgot. There is a stunning urgency in this work. Brown has an exacting way of composing a score of curated memories that tonally shifts with each voice, while disrupting the impulse of the reader to romanticize or fall into a lull of melancholy, by deftly shifting the rhythm and flow of the narrative. If you lie down, feels, at first, like a conversation with a friend, but lands with the brutality of human wholeness.”

“Colleen Brown has found a new way to approach memoir. Her method is to attend to the sharp, intact memories that have inexplicably remained with her, while resisting the temptation to fabricate forgotten or unwitnessed events. The result is an account that enacts the loss she knows as a person who is rendered motherless at a young age. Relying on a structure of interruption and incompletion, her narrative accepts the fact that aspects of the family story will remain obscure while other parts are indelible. The beauty of this writing is that there is no exploitation of emotion here, rather, the author has taken possession of her shards of memory and polished them into poetry. This is a unique and insightful work.”