A Compelling Book Underscores 3 Relationship Truths

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An effective book can inspire, inform, or entertain us. Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside (Knopf, 2019), a collection of eight short stories, impressively does all three. In addition, this book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, illuminates three psychological truths about relationships with more power than most empirical studies.

Each gem in the collection describes a specific incident that shines light on how deeply we need to offer love to others, the value of giving that surpasses that of receiving, and the inevitability of pain and loss because of the essential truth of impermanence.

Danticat’s book is not particularly comfortable—but, then, neither is life when it is fully lived. The people in her stories move through their relationships with sacrifice (for example, “Dosas”), attempts to metabolize betrayal and guilt over a spouse and child's death (“The Gift”), or exploring the unique pain of opening the heart and finding oneself exploited or otherwise damaged (“The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special”). In another story ("In the Old Days"), an invisible bond, the yearning for a phantom connection, unconsciously complicates the motivation of a woman who never knew her father. In yet another, a woman whose childhood friendship was a lifeline (“Seven Stories”) clings to an attachment that represented safety. You get the idea. All the stories are complex, illustrating more than one relationship truth.

The people in all the stories have ties to Haiti, although settings range from Brooklyn to Miami to Port-au-Prince to an unidentified island. Their backgrounds span a range of education and economic levels, ages from infancy to dementia, love relationships from friendship to adultery. Love forms in the bonds of childhood, family relationships, romantic relationships within and out of wedlock, even between a proprietress and her employee. Relationships cross geography, generations, duration. But three timeless psychological themes stream through the stories.

We need to love and to give. The power of the human heart to direct decisions is undeniable in these stories. The urge to care for another person motivates characters to engage in situations in which they are betrayed, in which one lover abandons another to found a school for needy children, or in which a man instinctively takes on the role of father surrogate, as examples. Decades of psychological research underscore the need for attachment along with benefits derived from close relationships when the bonds are secure. (See Simpson and Rholes reference, below.)

Giving surpasses receiving. Several stories illustrate the extent to which people show love through

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giving selflessly to another, like the college first-year who responds to her roommate’s father’s request and goes beyond her comfort zone to urge her altruistic roommate to return to school, or the aging mother who desperately wants her daughter to be able to understand the joys of sacrificing for a newborn. Even the woman who owns a hotel selflessly reaches out to care for an employee in need. Early psychological literature on altruism documents the benefits of giving that surpasses those of receiving. More recently, research on generosity, a popular topic in positive psychology, has shown the importance of being able to give something perceived to be of value to others. Altruistic love, originally labeled “agape,” has been explored in literature from the spiritual to the prosaic, in both theoretical and empirical studies.

The inevitability and pain of loss. Throughout the stories in Everything Inside, the reader

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encounters the inevitability of loss. Lives are changed forever, whether through natural death, an accident, abandonment, illness, or assassination. The pain that weaves its way through all eight of these unique gems arises ultimately from impermanence, with the inevitable grief that losing a person one loves must suffer. Yet attachments are always worth the price that must be paid when suffering their loss.

Danticat’s stories, written with a powerful voice and startling “authenticity,” serve to illuminate the heart of loving, from our hard-wired need to love, to the generosity of spirit it inspires, to the ultimate human truth of mourning and, hopefully, our resilience and the growth in wisdom we gain in the face of loss. I recommend them as a primer on being human in a relational world.

Copyright 2020 Roni Beth Tower.