Name All the Animals: A Memoir by Alison Smith

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An intensely stirring coming-of-age memoir by Alison Smith, Name All the Animals brilliantly explores the power and limitations of a family's faith. Smith was 15 when her older brother, Roy, was killed in a car accident, and her memoir follows her family as they attempt to put their lives back together. Her parents try to take comfort in their strong Catholic faith but are nonetheless shattered. For her part, Smith wonders why God has abandoned her. She finds cold comfort in Catholic symbols and rituals, feeling a connection to Roy only when she enters the old fort they had built together.

An engaging storyteller, Smith crafts her memoir to read like a novel, interspersing moving flashbacks of the times she spent with her brother with amusing portraits of the nuns at her parochial school, who sneak out of the infirmary to play cards and make autumnal visits to a secret swimming pool. As a child, Smith wonders why her father blesses her and Roy every morning, touching a relic to their foreheads, mouths, and hands, mentioning each individual body part. "He's got to name us, like Adam named the animals," Roy explained. "To keep track of them." The near impossibility of "keeping track," and the changing nature of faith are just two of the poignant messages in this unforgettable debut. (Winter/Spring 2004 Selection)

From the Publisher

A luminous, true story, Name All the Animals is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and of a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss. As children, siblings Alison and Roy Smith were so close that their mother called them by one name, Alroy. But when Alison was fifteen, she woke one day to learn that Roy, eighteen, was dead.

Heartbreaking but hopeful, this extraordinary memoir explores the after-math of Roy's death: his parents' enduring romance, the faith of a deeply religious community, and the excitement and anguish of Alison's first love — a taboo relationship that opens up a world beyond the death of her brother.

The New York Times

Roy remains real throughout the book, invoked at well-chosen intervals through memory and through his sister's acts of devotion. (She saves food for him. She regards even his worn-out running shoes with tenderness and reverence.) And the idea of punishment for her transgressions is equally substantial, giving the reader a sense of how much was at stake for her as she tried to regain her bearings. "Hell was a real place for us, as real as the next neighborhood," she writes. "In our insular Catholic world, hell practically had its own ZIP code." — Janet Maslin

Publishers Weekly

In her first book, Smith, an alumna of the Yaddo and MacDowell writers' colonies, confidently weaves together aspects of a traditional coming-of-age memoir with a story of unimaginable loss. In lucid, controlled prose, she meticulously reconstructs her family's journey through the three years following her 18-year-old brother Roy's death in a car accident, just weeks before he was to start college, in 1984. Despite their overwhelming grief, Smith's devout Catholic parents' faith does not waver, but the 15-year-old Smith grapples with her beliefs. "I thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us," she writes. "I thought I was being punished for some unknown sin." A student at a Rochester, N.Y., Catholic high school, Smith can't express her doubts, nor can she reveal her romantic feelings for one of her schoolmates, a less sheltered girl who introduces her to Colette and van Gogh. And even though Smith becomes exceedingly thin, her mother and father fail to notice she's anorexic. Name All the Animals (the title refers to Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden) includes many vivid images, although some of the language can seem too pretty and composed. The book closes with the third anniversary of Roy's death. "If I lived past the summer of my eighteenth year," Smith resolves, "I would have to face that Roy died and that I the little sister, the tagalong... would surpass him." It's a brave ending to an impressive debut. (Feb. 10) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This compelling memoir recounts the effect on a teenager, and her family, when her beloved brother and companion dies. So close are the siblings that their parents call them by a combined nickname Alroy (for Alison and Roy). Their parents are devout Catholics, and they live in a close-knit neighborhood. Roy is heading for college, and Alison, at 15, is working part time in the convent running the antiquated switchboard. This contented home is shattered when early one workday the police arrive to say that Roy has been killed in an accident. With no one thinking of therapy, Alison is left alone to grapple with her grief. Believing that she can bring Roy back if she feeds him, she stops eating and shares food with his ghost in a nightly ritual. People treat her as the "girl whose brother died," an excuse for almost any behavior. Even when Alison begins a love affair with a fellow female student, the result is trouble for her friend and not for her. Smith subtly, and without judgment, presents the actions and behaviors of her family, teachers, friends, and herself during the three years following Roy's death. A powerful story told and read with great skill by the author; highly recommended.-Kathleen A. Sullivan, Phoenix P.L. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-The Smiths were a close-knit Catholic family living in the suburbs in the early 1980s, but their lives were so insulated and defined by the Father's devout observances that they had the innocent quality of a much earlier time. Alison, 15, and Roy, 18, were so close that their parents referred to them as Alroy. When he was killed in an automobile accident, his sister lost more than a brother; she lost her identity as well. The whole community joined the family in their grief for this popular teen. Denial was a way of life for the Smiths and, in their well-meaning zeal to protect their daughter, the news clippings of Roy's death and the factual closure they might have provided were kept from her. This compelling memoir, told with disarming wit in spite of the grim circumstances, is eloquent, funny, and moving. Readers will relate to the social scene of an all-girls Catholic school, delight in the tricks played on the faculty, and applaud Alison's ultimate self-knowledge and victory over depression and anorexia.-Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An impressive debut memoir of grief and growing up. In 1984, when the author was only 15, her 18-year-old brother Roy was burned to death in an automobile crash. Her struggle to come to terms with this loss and find her way again is recounted here with a clear eye and astonishing frankness. Smith’s parents were staunch Catholics; not to believe in the existence of God, she writes, would have been like not believing in "oatmeal, or motorcars, or the laws of gravity." With her brother’s death, Alison’s faith suddenly vanished, to be replaced by study and reading. If only she could understand how space, time, light, and movement were linked in the fourth dimension, she believed, Roy would come back to her. Smith’s parents, however, clung to their faith; her father still blessed her each morning with a holy relic to keep her safe. The author’s observations of her parents’ reaction to the loss of their only son are marked by a cool objectivity and filled with telling detail. Inexplicably, they seemed to be unaware that their grief-stricken remaining child was starving herself and wandering outside at all hours of the night. Smith’s mother, it seems, was an expert at rewriting the past and pretending that unwanted events did not actually happen. At Sisters of Mercy High School, the nuns overlooked Alison’s strange or out-of-line behaviors. When she fell in love with another girl and the two of them were discovered in bed together, only her companion’s reputation suffered. The nuns and her classmates saw Smith as "the girl whose brother died," more to be pitied than censured. For months before the third anniversary of Roy’s death, the tagalong little sister, now 18 and not wanting to surpass herbig brother, planned to reenact the accident, following him into death. Her attempt failed, her appetite for life returned, and Roy finally became a ghost figure for Alison, if not for her parents. Powerful, unsentimental, candid, and moving.

What People Are Saying

Laura Moriarty
To read Name All the Animals is to witness a fierce battle between a teenager's despair and her almost subconscious will to survive and find joy. In poetic but understated prose, Smith carries the reader through her grief without ever resorting to fairy tales or half-truths; her refusal of easy comforts is what gives this memoir so much weight and beauty. I will recommend it to everyone I know.

Haven Kimmel
Tender, sad, and without a trace of self-pity, Name All the Animals is a beautiful memoir. I'll never forget it.

Laura Shaine Cunningham
In refusing to lose her brother, Roy, Smith gives us a memoir devoted to what truly matters. It has been a long time since I have read an account of a daughter, son, mother, and father who love one another, free of resentments and pettiness. Name All the Animals is a memoir that celebrates a lost life and escorts us past sorrow into the drama of a love story.

David Schickler
The grief in this memoir is the size of Goliath....Ms. Smith, with scrappy, unsentimental grace, battles her giant and wins our spectator hearts. Her brother, her schooldays, her prose, her candor — all are lean and vital. Alison Smith is a cool warrior of a writer, but she makes us want to hug her and her story with every possible human warmth.

Judy Blunt
I am speechless with admiration. Name All the Animals demands a "must-read" list of its own. I find it hard to imagine the reader who would end Smith's book and not have tucked away a deeper, more profound understanding of how we survive this human condition of faith and grief, of love and life.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

This fracturing of reality and memory comes in Name All the Animals to stand for the impermanence -- the mysteriousness -- of existence itself. This is one of the great and overarching themes of this memoir, one that allows the author's hard-won wisdom an authority beyond the bounds of her family. Grief, although immense and deeply destructive of the ordinary world, also grants the suffering person access to new, sometimes revelatory ways of seeing reality. Book clubs will find that throughout Name All the Animals, death, mourning, and recovery are only the "plot" of the story -- its meaning is much more complex, indeed, resisting all the names readers may try to give it.

Throughout the book, Smith uses flashbacks to explore not just her grief but also the unique and wonderful nature of the bond that can be forged between a brother and sister (the pair were so close that they sometimes went by the shared name "Alroy"). But she also uses these scenes to open up the question of how we understand ourselves and how we define our identities in the turbulence of adolescence. We see how defining oneself as part of a pair or a team can be a way of both standing apart and belonging to something larger than oneself. Reading groups may wish to use this facet of the book to open discussions of their adolescent years, and the difficulties of "finding oneself" in that time.

Name All the Animals is also a story about first love, and the awakening of the author's identity as a gay woman -- an event fraught with terrors for a religious girl attending a strict Catholic school. Smith's experience of both joyous discovery and confused pain, made more intense by the aftershocks of her brother's death -- is rendered in Name All the Animals with a delicate touch, marking the writer's later understanding of the chaotic emotions she experienced at the time. Smith uses her own story to explore problems faced by many gay teens -- internalized shame and institutional, social, and familial hostility -- but she renders them not as cardboard examples of a stereotyped identity but as unique, poetically illuminated moments that ultimately resonate on a truly universal level. It's a sensitive yet unflinching treatment of desire, shame, and confusion, and Smith leaves readers with a wonderful opportunity to discuss both our society's attitudes toward same-sex relationships and our own difficulties in grasping and articulating the power that love has to shape our lives. Bill Tipper

Discussion Questions from the Publisher

1. Prologues are often used as a way of setting the tone or focusing the reader's attention on an event that may symbolically resonate throughout the book. In Name All the Animals, what is the intention of the prologue? What does it illuminate? What do you find symbolic about the halved, abandoned house?
2. "Alroy" is the nickname that the author, Alison Smith, shared with her brother Roy. To be sure, she states, "It's not my name. It's ours, my brother's and mine"(page 6). How does this merging of names affect Alison and Roy's identity?
3. As a child, Roy tells Alison that their father's blessing of his children each morning is similar to Adam's naming all the animals in Eden, recognizing and protecting them. As the story progresses, Alison realizes she cannot even find a name for some of the feelings she experiences. On page 61, she writes, "These phrases rattled around inside me. I had no name for the feelings they conjured up. Like captions for a set of lost photographs, I knew what the individual words meant but I didn't know what to attach them to. And my parents didn't know how to tell me." Examine the idea of naming as a theme, especially with regard to the title. What is the title's significance?
4. The Smith's are a staunchly Catholic, working-class family who "had one talent: faith"(page 18). Discuss the family's notion of faith. In particular, discuss Alison's faithfulness after Roy's death. In what ways is it increased and/or diminished?
5. After Roy's death, Alison finds herself intrigued by the "Before-People" because "In that innocence, that powerful ignorance, Roy lived"(page 25). Explain how Alison, in her own ignorance of the details surrounding Roy's death, is similar to the Before-People.
6. Alison's parents become understandably overprotective of her; she is, after all, their surviving child. Her father laments, "You're all I have left"(page 16). In fact, they are all each of them has. How does Roy's death strengthen familial ties? In what ways does it serve to create a chasm between Alison and her parents?
7. Speaking of her family's coping skills, Alison states, "We remained removed, one foot in this world, one foot in the next with Roy"(page 74). Is Alison able to successfully navigate between the two worlds? What coping mechanisms does she employ to deal with the loss?
8. Beyond being a story about loss, Name All the Animals is about a young woman coming of age. Discuss the challenges she encounters as a teenager.
9. Alison has a few close friends: Mary Elizabeth, the girl next door, Susanna Spindale, the eccentric drama queen, and Terry, the disheveled artist. Compare these friendships. What does Alison learn about herself through these friendships?
10. At a Halloween party, Susanna Spindale is the only one brave enough to ask Alison about Roy. Alison admits, "A part of me was glad for the question. I felt relieved that somebody was finally asking"(page114). Discuss the communal silence that surrounds Roy's death. Do you think this silence helps or hinders the healing process?
11. Overprotective and cautious, Alison's parents "waited for the Next Terrible Thing"(page 74). How did this constant fear of impending doom affect the Smiths? Particularly, discuss how fear manifests as self-doubt in Alison.
12. Alison talks about how her mother revered "goodness" as a virtue. Later, she realizes "that sometimes you have to step outside of goodness to discover who you are"(page 224). What do you think she eventually discovers?
13. When an insurance company wants to investigate Roy's death, Alison's father stresses, "You must not tell anyone"(page 71). Discuss the many secrets that are harbored by the Smiths as a family and by Alison independently. Why do you think the keeping of appearances is so important to them?
14. Alison's debate topic on gay and lesbian rights stirs up a tremendous amount of controversy, publicly as well as personally. How does she deal with the upheaval? What personal revelations occur as a result?
15. Traumatized by Roy's accident, Alison and her father are reluctant about her learning to drive. Despite failing the driving test twice, she claims, "I wanted to drive"(page 292). What is Alison's motivation for wanting to drive? By trying to lose her life the same way Roy did, at the same time, on the same road, three years later, what does she gain?

Read an Excerpt

The girls at the Rochester Skating Academy in 1984 were a hardy bunch -- great jumpers, who raced around the rink backwards at high speeds. I was the one in the corner by the sidewall pushing my wire-rim glasses up my nose, my stockings bunched at the knees. I did not jump. My spins were slow and careful. But I did have one thing going for me. I was good at Patch.

Patch was named for the sectioning of the ice into six-by-eight-foot strips or patches. The first thing to do when you get to your assigned patch is carve two adjacent circles, using an instrument called a scribe (which looks like an overgrown compass). On that huge number eight you try to skate the perfect figure. It's harder than it looks -- keeping the cut line of the blade arced, the skate moving at a good clip, never straying from the two circles. It was my favorite part of the day: the collective silence of concentration, drilling over and over a single blade turn, the subtle weight shifts, from front to back, right to left. This measured intricacy, the repetitive devotion it required -- it was the closest you could get to praying on ice.

In late July, three months after I started my indoor skating career, I had an accident during morning Patch Hour. While practicing the 180-degree turn in the center of the eight, I slipped and fell. Sixteen pairs of eyes looked up from their patches and stared at me. I tried to stand up. My leg warmers slid down over my heels. I moved to adjust them, and then I saw it. In the center of the eight, at the fulcrum of the north and south circles, lay a spot of blood. A darkening stain ran across the crotch of my skating dress. I crossed my legs.

Moments later, in the bathroom at the Rochester Skating Rink, dark flowers of blood spread across the toilet water. I called Mother from a pay phone in the hall.

"It's your first," she whispered into the phone. She was at the architecture firm where she worked as a secretary.

"I've got blood all over me!"

"All right. I'll meet you in the bathroom, the one by the soda machine."

"Bring a bucket."

"Oh stop," she said. "It's not that bad."

I waited for Mother in the stall farthest from the door. When she entered, her low heels clip-clopped across the floor. She went straight for the last stall and opened the door. My skates were still on, the laces loosened. I had crammed half a roll of toilet paper between my legs. She slouched, one hand on her hip. "Alroy," she whispered as she shook her head. It's not my name. It's ours, my brother's and mine. A pet name she made up, combining Roy's name and mine into a single shorthand. "That bad, Alroy?" she asked.

I nodded and gazed up at her.

My mother stood in her homemade wraparound skirt with the blue flowers. She had tucked a white summer blouse into its ribboned waist. She wore her hair short, in a Dorothy Hamill cut, and in the humidity it curled out around her ears like wings. She slid her purse off her shoulder, pulled out a pack of extrathick sanitary pads, a bottle of pills, and a collapsible camping cup. She crossed over to the sink, filled the cup with water, and thrust both her hands under my nose. One held the cup, the other two pink pills.

"Take these."

I swallowed the pills. She ran her hand over my forehead. I pushed her away. She handed me a pad and backed up. Through the metal door I heard her sigh. She tapped her foot. I leaned back. The flusher jabbed me in the kidneys. I peeled the white adhesive strip off the back of the pad and slid my skating dress down.

Mother drove me home. After she set me up in bed with a bottle of Midol and a copy of the Psalms, she made no proud speech about my initiation into womanhood, offered no advice on the prevention of menstrual cramps or the application of sanitary pads. She cleared her throat, ran her fingers through her hair, and said, "I'll tell Daddy. You tell Roy."

And with that she left me and returned to work.

When Roy showed up outside my bedroom door later that afternoon, he was holding a portable radio. He had just come from his morning job as a groundskeeper at a local country club and was already dressed for his second summer job as a cashier at Tops Supermarket. The stiff red uniform vest, boxy and oversized, hung on his narrow frame. Wrapping a leg around the door, he leaned into the room. "Hey, little sister, who's your superman? Hey, little sister, who's the one you want?" he crooned along with Billy Idol. Then he pulled back, hit his head against the doorframe, and tumbled to the ground, moaning in mock pain.

"Roy-dee," I hollered, from under the covers.

"Little Sister," he hollered back, pulling himself up.

Billy Idol was not his music of choice. He was more a fan of the Police and the Who, but he knew this song drove me crazy. Whenever the local station played it, he rushed toward me, his arms out, singing at the top of his lungs.

I yelled over the sound of the radio. "I'm sick!"

"What?" he yelled back.

I pointed at the radio. He turned it down.

"I'm sick."

He walked into the room. "How do I look?" Under the uniform vest he wore an orange Hawaiian shirt and maroon running pants.

"Terrible. Everything clashes."

"Good!" His head bobbed up and down. "It's your turn to do the dishes."

"Will you do them?"

He glanced over at me. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

His hands thrummed out a beat against the door. "I thought you said you were sick."

I could feel the blood rushing to my head. My face grew hot. "I have my period."

"Your what?"

"My period!"

The thrumming stopped. I could hear him breathing; his lungs were congested. "Oh," he said.

He became engrossed in the pattern of his Hawaiian shirt. His hair was long; he had let it grow now that he was not in school. It ran over his ears and scrolled out around the base of his skull. The sun was shining in the window over the porch, and the evergreens' bright needles shimmered in the windless afternoon. He stepped into the room, picked up my skates, and started swinging them by the laces.

"Don't touch those," I said. I reached across the bed, grabbed them from him, and shoved them under the blankets.

He cleared his throat. "It's supposed to rain tonight," he said.

"What do you want, Alroy?"

"It's your turn to do the dishes."

"You do them."

"No, you."

"No, you."

"No, you."

"Loser," I said.

"Dweeb."

"Mutant."

"Moron!" And then he lost it. He broke into a grin. Paper white teeth, three dimples -- one on either side and a little dent in his chin.

"Alroy," I said.

He disappeared behind the door again. He coughed once. The breath rattled in and out of him. He had just recovered from a nasty bout of bronchitis. One hand on the door, the other on the doorframe, he leaned back into the room and smiled. From my position on the bed I saw only half of him. A slice of brown hair, tan skin, and the hideous orange and red.

Outside a mourning dove cooed. The sun beat down on us through the back window, no trace of the coming storm. It was four in the afternoon. I looked away. I felt a slip in the air, a nearly imperceptible change in temperature. I turned to catch him, but he had already left.

I fell asleep, my hands wrapped around my skates. I slept straight through without eating supper, without going to my evening job at the Sisters of Mercy Convent. And as I slept a storm gathered over Lake Ontario, ten miles to the north. At one o'clock the sky broke open. Rain pelted the ground, rivered into the gullies along Penfield Road. It rained all night, and it was raining the next morning when Roy left for work. Friday, July 27, 1984. Father stopped him at the front door.

"What are you going to do," Father asked, "in the rain?"

Roy tossed the keys to the van from his right hand to his left and hitched up his shorts. "We'll wash the golf carts," he said.

At 5:51 a.m. Father opened the front door for him. Roy ducked into the driving storm. He was gone. It was not for another two hours, when it was too late, that I would walk into the kitchen and see. He had done the dishes after all.