Instead, the event that opens the collection is just one of many focal points, and Dear Damage is so much more than the story of a shooting. It’s a family memoir, one that reaches all the way back to the 1930s, when Bill and Frances were children, and then to the decades afterward, as they met each other and fell in love and moved and started their family. It’s a memoir that tells the story of Farmer’s mother, as well, and how she came to care for the Dressers at their home in Nevada, and it’s the story of the author’s siblings and their own migrations and tragedies and successes. It’s Ashley Marie Farmer’s story, too, or at least the part of it that tells of her first marriage, how and why it dissolved, and of her graduate studies at Syracuse’s Creative Writing program. It’s a lamentation on what it means to love teaching, and how adjuncting is a warped reality of that love. And it’s an ode, too, that details how she fell in love later with the writer Ryan Ridge, and how they’ve managed to craft a relationship as steadfast and essential as her grandparents’. In the essay “Slow Circles,” for example, Farmer seems to draw on some of the familiar notes from Frances and Bill’s life together to parallel her own:
We’ve been engaged for years, have long lived in California, have ridden the Santa Monica Ferris wheel together, have shared an apartment and bills, sickness and health, family births and deaths and changes, all by the time we actually decide to make it legal for practical reasons. We consider a backyard desert party in Bill and Frances’s yard, but the logistics are tricky. “And besides,” Ryan says, “I was at your first wedding”—that’s close enough for him, good enough for me.
The collection is also a gorgeous memoir of place. Of regions like Long Beach, California, and the parallel lives that Farmer and her grandparents had carved out there, decades apart from each other, before and after it was eaten up by Los Angeles County. Of Louisville, where Farmer and her nuclear family lived after her father’s job sent them to Kentucky, and where she returned after stints in California. Of Carson City, Nevada, and the Dressers’ home there, which Farmer and her siblings have etched into their hearts after so many visits.
Perhaps most importantly, Dear Damage is a love letter to Farmer’s grandparents—much of it, in fact, is narrated by the Dressers themselves. In what’s shown to be incredible foresight on Farmer’s part, she includes segments of transcripts from interviews she made with Bill and Frances as she traveled with them in the years before Frances’ terrible slip in the living room. The transcripts reveal fond memories of growing up in Los Angeles, of what it was like before the streetcars were removed and the smog filled in the gaps, and of trips taken to places like Long Beach and Venice. Of Frances working for a time at Capitol Records. Of Bill’s service and his 33 years spent in the local shipyard, from back when he was a mechanic and, later, a supervisor. Of what the exodus from Los Angeles was like afterward.