At the heart of Christine Kalafus’ upcoming memoir Flood (2025) is a powerful image: a rush of water, not a deluge from the skies but a slow rising from below, invisibly soaking through the porous foundations of an old house until, before you know it, you are wading ankle deep in what was the solid under-level of your home, wondering how on earth you will contain the uncontainable.
The flood in Flood is literal: Kalafus’ home outside of New Haven, nicknamed “the Witch House” (20) on account of its steep gable, stands on saturated soil, and every time it rains, “small puddles formed in shallow dips before traveling in every direction, eventually forming a two-inch deep pond” (34).
It is also a historical flood, a trauma inherited from both of her parents who grew up in the Connecticut River Valley and experienced, as children, the ur-flood of this memoir: the “Great Flood” of 1955, when two hurricanes blasted through Southern New England within the space of a week, leaving Kalafus’ father with no drinking water, her mother with no electricity. Coffins, swept out of graves by the force of the torrent, floated down the Naugatuck river. [1]
The flood in Flood is also an evocative, multivalent metaphor, anchoring the chaotic events and disparate storylines of the memoir to that visual motif: water rising, under the surface, drowning from the inside anything and everything that stands in their way. Flood focuses on a moment in its author’s life when a concatenation of unpredictable, unmanageable events threaten to overwhelm and drown her: her husband’s affair with another woman, an unexpected twin pregnancy, and a breast cancer diagnosis during that pregnancy.
Each of these speaks the language of the flood: cancer cells, like water drops, multiply under the skin’s surface; tensions in a marriage build up unseen before breaking out, widening the cracks in the foundation. Babies grow in the silent waters of the uterus, before bursting out and unleashing their own kind of hurricane on their mother: diapers and feedings and laundry and crying and worries and hormones that, even if experienced before—Kalafus’ twins have an older brother—are no less overwhelming.
Kalafus writes about these experiences in a raw voice that sometimes loses its coherence, but never its honesty. The narrative voice—sometimes poetic, sometimes blunt, relentlessly intimate but not particularly self-reflective or descriptive—made it hard to form an image of the woman at the center of the book. Her values, her priorities, her personality, even her feelings, remain somewhat of a mystery.
I often found myself wishing for more moments of description and analysis of the relationships that structure her life: for example, her mother is always at the background, helping with the twins and the cancer treatments and the unexpected expenses of, in one instance, buying a wig while undergoing chemotherapy, but the narrator’s feelings about that maternal presence remain unexplored. Is the relationship colored primarily by comfortable dependence and gratitude, or resentment for the infringement upon her independence, as indispensable as this help was? A narratorial commitment to characterizing this relationship and others, or to paint a more detailed picture in general of the emotional landscape which is disrupted by the events the book focuses on, would have made the reading experience more cohesive, and its impact felt more deeply.
Moments of reflection and self-analysis are interpolated into the narrative, but in short bursts, without allowing them to fully develop. This is especially frustrating at crucial moments in the story, such as, for example, the encounter with the doctor who dismisses her concerns over a lump in her breast. The flat narration of this encounter is a powerful portrayal of medical arrogance: “‘It doesn’t feel like nothing,’ I say from the obstetric table, belly in the air. ‘It’s nothing’, he says, winking, throwing his gloves in the trash” (9).
The scene concludes with a single observation regarding her own character: “So there’s a lump, big deal, I say to myself in the car. He’s the one wearing a white coat with diplomas on the wall. I was raised to not only accept authority but revere it” (ibid., emphasis mine). The problem Kalafus points to here is systemic and pervasive, both from the perspective of the medical field —dismissing female patients’ valid concerns is a well-documented phenomenon [2]—and in the socialization of women to “accept” and even “revere” authority. Here, then, was an opportunity for Kalafus to elaborate a little on her own origin story, to offer some insight into the process that led her to doubt herself in the face of self-assured men, and to thus grant more depth to her eventually overcoming that self-doubt, and insisting to be checked and tested. But instead, the story moves on.
At the same time, the choice to forego a more reflective stance and instead work through the events in the present tense, as it were, makes the memoir all the more compelling. Instead of getting to know the woman whose story is being recounted, we are pulled into her experience in all its rawness, immediacy, and over-crowdedness of sensations. The bluntness of the narration and the unsparing visual and sensory details of intimate medical procedures are often uncomfortable to read, transmitting to the reader the discomfort of having gone through them.
This is especially true for the moments in which the healthy abundance of maternity clashes with the disease, the unhealthy abundance of multiplying cells: he body-horror of, for example, the cavity left behind by the lumpectomy surgery being flooded with milk (98), is visceral in a way that a more reflective narration would not enable. And perhaps this is the point: some experiences cannot be made-sense-of, cannot be strung together to form a coherent, digestible narrative, but must be faced like an onslaught; like a flood.
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Image credit: Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
