Welcome to NYLON Book Club!

Our October selection is Sarah Perry's After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, A Daughter's Search.

Prepare to go on an intense journey from page one of this beautifully written, utterly heart-rending book, in which Perry details her experience as a 12-year-old witness to her mother's assault and murder, and the long aftermath of this brutal crime.

Below is an excerpt from After the Eclipse.

Read the book, and join us for an interview with Perry on October 30th at 11am. 

>> RSVP!

Throughout those first weeks, I became fixated on an image: the inside of my head filling with a viscous blackness, insanity as matter, crowding my mind into a tight corner. I knew I had to keep the blackness contained or it would take over; it would suffocate me entirely. I so terribly feared insanity. The part of me that had seen the huge insect in the dark arms of the clock that night, that had heard that sturgeon thrashing on the floor, had to be locked up so it couldn’t take over. I considered restraint and control my best defenses. So mostly I did not cry. Mostly I stayed calm. Cheryl, the social worker, said that her teenage daughter thought I mourned “with grace,” and I thought that was the kindest thing someone could say about me. I wondered, though, how Cheryl’s daughter knew anything about it.

But the Blackness, as I thought of it then, wasn’t just insanity. I could feel that what the killer had done had gotten inside of me. I had seen what a person could do and I could never unsee it; I was unclean, poisoned. I looked into my pupils in the mirror and there seemed to be no bottom to the black. Just as much as I feared him out in the world, I feared him within me.

The worst part of feeling poisoned was that it seemed to wipe out anything in me that was gentle and intelligent and funny — all the things my mother had loved about me. I was devastated to think that if she had ever been able to come back, I might already be unrecognizable to her.

Despite my attempts at control, there were moments of breakage. One came the night after the murder, or the night after that. We were sitting around Grammy’s dining room table — Gwen and Glenice and I, and Carol and Grammy. I was trying to eat something. The idea of my body and its processes still disgusted me. I would look at my calves, shaped just like hers, and they would seem like flesh, like meat, like something that could be dead and inert tomorrow. Grinding an object with my teeth, swallowing its paste, adding yet more to this body — this vulgar, heavy, gross thing I had to carry around — was gruesome. Even showering was difficult: faced with my solid, naked self, having to touch and attend to limbs, belly, to my useless feet, still raw from the run to get help, I shut down completely, stood staring for minutes at a time. My body persisted as a living, warm vehicle, while hers had become a thing under a tarp. The blood flowing neatly through my veins gave me a feeling of horror, a sense of invasion. I didn’t feel like I inhabited a living body so much as a temporarily animated corpse.

But I tried. My aunts told me I needed my strength, and I agreed. The meal that night was something I loved, one of my favorites, a leftover from the days of sitting happily with Grammy, a stuffed animal in my lap. Fish sticks and mashed potatoes, maybe. A meal that would have brought joy even a week before. Now I could only eat a bite of it before I had to stop.

Little things can, for moments, carry the full force of tragedy. I looked at this meal and it was all the childhood happiness I’d ever enjoyed and would never feel again, and I started to cry. And as I cried, I thought about how some person — not a tornado or a hurricane or a car crash or a fire, but a person — had taken her away from me, had robbed me of everything, and a great, furious wave suddenly swept over me. “I can’t eat! I can’t fucking eat!” I screamed. “Why would someone do this? Why! Why the fuck did this happen?! FUCK HIM! FUCK HIM!”

I kept on like this, banging the table with my fist. I could see that my aunts and my grandmother were terrified, and I ran with it. I wanted someone else to be afraid, I wanted someone else to feel everything spin entirely out of control. The fact that I had no face upon which to focus my hatred only intensified it. I raged at my helplessness, and at the fact that no one around me knew what they were talking about. My aunts’ attempts to soothe me only made me angrier. “You don’t fucking understand!” I told them, although they would have admitted that themselves. But I was beyond being fair. I was nearly blacked out.

Somewhere within me, though, I could see myself breaking down. As I burned off some of my trapped energy, that calmer, older self came out and shone a light in my head: I couldn’t let him do this to me. I could not let the shadow take over.

Just then, Grammy approached me with some pills. I was sobbing but no longer banging the table, and I saw her hand shake as she laid them in front of me. I picked up my glass of water and took them, didn’t ask what they were, didn’t pay attention to how many. I had always had a childish difficulty swallowing pills, but now I opened up and threw them down my throat. I became quiet immediately, all the fight leaving me as quickly as it had entered. The pills could not have worked that fast; I was just too tired to go on. Defeated. I didn’t look at anyone’s face. I got up from the table and headed for the living room couch, and as I did, I saw on the kitchen counter the box from which the pills had come. Cold medicine. They truly did not know what to do.