Dear Esteemed Readers,
A few months ago, I mentioned reading an advanced copy of Ron Currie’s novel, The Savage, Noble Death Of Babs Dionne. In just a few days—on March 25, 2025—that book will be published; so I decided to share a related story that involves Alicia, Ron, Carl Jung, Kingsly, a Frenchman, and me.
After I reached out to Ron via email last December and told him how much I enjoyed his latest, we went back and forth a little about what it means to be of French-Canadian ancestry in New England. Ron has first-hand knowledge. My experience comes vicariously via marriage, as Alicia is of French-Canadian descent on both her mother’s and her father’s side.
Because Mr. Currie is impressive on the sentence-level and creates fascinating, psychologically-correct characters, I had called Ron a “literary beast” in my email, which tickled him enough to say—perhaps jokingly—that he wished he could have put the “literary beast” part on his hardback cover. Then he said he was curious about Alicia’s upbringing.
Even though it was too late to put the below on the hardback, I wrote Ron an official blurb anyway:
"A furious page-turner that kept me up way past my bedtime, a beautiful hymn to the lingering ghosts of Maine's French-Canadian past, and a harrowing meditation on what it means to assimilate into the great American experiment. The authenticity reaches up off the page and grabs you with two hands. Ron Currie is a literary beast." Matthew Quick
And then I told Alicia about Ron’s book, which led to much talk about her French-Canadian heritage. She used Ron’s inquiry as an excuse to interview her parents by phone. They reminisced about growing up back when there were still tight-knit communities of French-speaking people living in New England. Alicia got the sense that her Mom and Dad had been eager to talk about these things. I got the sense that the chat was a good experience for all three of them.
Alicia already knew some of the memories that her parents recounted—like her father’s first language being French and her Memere Bessette opening the first French-Canadian-owned general store in their family’s part of rural Connecticut, back in the sixties.
Other things she hadn’t heard before—like there being signs at the local WASP-owned and operated textile mills excluding Irish from working there. So the French-Canadian employees didn’t always feel like the lowest of the low.
This led to Alicia and me remembering how—whenever I asked about my heritage—my grandfather had always insisted that he and I were simply American. But then when Alicia and I were in our twenties and about to go to Ireland, Pop Pop whispered that we were “maybe also Irish” and that when I got to Ireland, I should ask around about the anglicization of our last name.
I asked Alicia why she and her father both were—at times—reluctant to speak French, even though my father-in-law was fluent as a child and she had majored in French when we were at La Salle, taking entire classes en français.
She said she suspects her dad knows more French than he lets on, but that she never really was fluent and had forgotten what little she had learned long ago.
And I wondered why we were all so timid about claiming our heritages.
How had that happened?
Why were we all whispering and denying?
Ron’s book has a lot to say about that.
So, on Christmas Eve morning, I wrote Ron an email about all of the above, not quite knowing why. It felt a little strange to send a late blurb that would probably never be used. Yes, he had said he would appreciate one. Yes, he had asked about Alicia’s relationship to the language and culture of her forebears. Yes, his book is about French-Canadians in New England, specifically Maine. It’s a crime novel, but it is simultaneously a smart and fierce look at diaspora. I had enjoyed the brief back and forth with a fellow writer. I really did love his book. And there seemed to be good will on both sides. But a part of me worried that I was stepping over a line, offering too much of myself. Most business emails in the literary world are short enough to feel curt to the unaccustomed. Everyone is busy. We are supposed to be writing novels, not emails. But I sent all the words I wrote anyway, knowing that they were true, were being offered in the spirit of literary brotherhood, I wasn’t expecting—or needing—anything to come back, and it was the day before Christmas, too, so not a time to be Scrooge-like with anything, including correspondence.
Then Alicia, Kingsly, and I drove over the swing bridge that connects Lady’s Island to the old Beaufort waterfront. We walked past the historic mansions and all the palm trees decorated for Christmas. Tourists were hustling in and out of the shops, hunting down last-minute gifts, so we avoided Bay Street and walked toward the less-crowded neighborhoods nearby. Soon we were alone and striding briskly through the shockingly cold—for the south anyway—December air.
I told Alicia what I had written to Ron. Alicia once again insisted that she could not speak French and that she hated it when I told people she could.
“But you can speak French. At least a little,” I said.
She frowned and changed the subject.
Then we fell into a conversation about Carl Jung.
I said something like, “Do you ever worry—after all the Jungian analysis we’ve done—that maybe Jung just made everything up? Like how can we test that dream interpretation is a real thing? Or the collective unconscious? And what if synchronicities really are just meaningless coincidences? Do you ever worry that we’ve both bought into something that might be a psychological balm but isn’t really taking us anywhere?”
“No. And that’s pretty dark talk for Christmas Eve,” Alicia said.
When I laughed, Alicia laughed with me, and then everything felt okay.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s believe in Jung. I had this dream last night about one of my former students. Do you want to analyze it?”
“I’ll give it a shot,” she said.
Halfway through my telling of the long and complicated dream, a man in his seventies approached us. The smart phone screen in his hand was illuminated.
In rapid-fire staccato, he said what sounded to my ear like, “Ewe-no where-tay starheet?”
I looked at Alicia, like, What?
“Water Street?” she asked him.
The man smiled and raised his phone so we could see the map. He pointed to Water Street.
“Are you French?” Alicia asked.
“Parlez-vous français?” His eyebrows peeked up over his glasses.
Alicia and I both said, “Un peu,” which lit up the man’s face like a Christmas tree.
But while I only knew how to say ‘A little,” in French, Alicia continued the conversation past that first elementary call and response. My wife and the Frenchman traded words and then Alicia was on her phone plotting out a route, as ‘moi’ watched helplessly, thinking I should not have relied so much on a former classmate to help me just barely trick my high school French teacher into giving me the passing grades I needed to fulfill the foreign language requirement.
Once Alicia had our new French-speaking friend sorted out, we wished him a Joyeux Noël et Bonne année and then parted ways.
“Why do you always say you can’t speak French?” I asked my wife as we continued walking.
“Because I can’t,” she said.
“But you just did!”
“Only the most simple phrases.”
“And yet you helped that man.”
“Maybe. Who knows if he’ll actually get where he wants to go?”
“Water Street. Seems loaded with symbolism,” I said.
“Is it weird that we just ran into a French-speaking man while we were talking about Jung and synchronicity and your writing Ron Currie that long email about his French-Canadian inspired book and my French-Canadian ancestry?”
“Have you ever once before met a French-speaking person in Beaufort?”
“Nope.”
I threw an arm around Alicia’s shoulders and we walked back toward the riverfront on a suddenly slightly less cold Christmas Eve day.
What to make of all that?
My thoughts and actions definitely didn’t make the Frenchman magically appear on Christmas Eve. But because Alicia and I are both in Jungian analysis; and I had read Ron’s book; and he and I’d had an email exchange; and I’d shared all that with my wife; and she had the conversation with her parents about what it meant to be French-Canadian in New England during the mid-twentieth century—meeting the Frenchman in Beaufort while discussing all of the above took on a heightened significance. So maybe my choosing to participate when Ron sent me the email blast announcing the upcoming publication of his novel—maybe that afforded me the opportunity to imbue my life with a certain flavor that symbolically enhanced and heightened my interaction with the lost Frenchman and produced this Substack post.
Maybe meaning = chance + what we have been consciously choosing to focus on.
And maybe that’s not nothing.
The above certainly offers more utility to we meaning-fueled machines than there is no meaning, so end of story.
Needless to say, Alicia and I are both still in Jungian analysis.
And I’m still trying very hard to be more open to the rhythms of the world—allowing myself to flow with instead of against the great cosmic tides.
When I choose ‘there is no meaning’ or ‘nothing matters at all,’ the storyteller in me begins to die. And I think I need to keep him alive and well. People in my company tend to smile and laugh more whenever my inner storyteller is thriving.
Later that night, Ron wrote me back saying he had told his wife about my blurb. He said she was a big fan of Silver Linings, he wished me a Merry Christmas, and hinted that there would be more words to come after the holiday—all of which made me smile.
I’m writing this between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so we shall see what emerges down the road.
But for now, I’m going into 2025 trusting my instincts more, especially when my instincts suggest that I should take a chance connecting with others. I know I won’t match one-hundred percent of the time with everyone and that’s perfectly okay. But I think the key is staying open to at least the possibility of union and paying attention to the little encouraging signs that I’m gifted along the way.
Life is more beautiful when we allow some coincidences to be elevated to the level of synchronicity. Especially for fiction writers. After all, symbols and patterns are the primary tools of storytellers. And who doesn’t need their life to be a good story?
Speaking of excellent tales, check out Ron’s book, The Savage, Nobel Death Of Babs Dionne, via the Penguin Random House website. It’s fantastic. I couldn’t put it down.
Where will the good rhythms take you when you open yourself up to them?
Your man in the Lowcountry,
Matthew
PS - Did you read the February 21st post? Bambi And The Philadelphia Eagles (Gratitude)