The new novel by Nick Fuller Googins — The Frequency of Living Things — opens with a young woman named Josie Tayloe crabwalking between parked cars at a gas station in Maine. She’s carefully checking windshields, side mirrors and radiator grills for insect specimens to advance a long-abandoned research project. She finds one — a rare moth that had once been her Holy Grail of invertebrates — and briefly envisions a glorious return to entomology after her overdue vacation.
And then she gets a call from her sister. Another crisis. Another quick U-turn from her regularly scheduled life.
This sets in motion the story of the Tayloe family — an American epic that explores the sacrifices of sisterhood, the implacable bonds of parent and child, and the challenge of getting past hurt to forgiveness.
Josie Tayloe is the left-brained, hardworking younger sibling of rock star twin older sisters, Emma and Ara. The twins’ first and only album earned a Grammy nomination and diehard fans decades ago. But they’re en route to being one-hit wonders, and when Ara’s substance use hits crisis proportions, the sisters try vastly different strategies in hopes of saving her. And then there’s their absentee mother, Bertie, a radical do-gooder who has always put the world’s needs ahead of her daughters.
Googins’s writing is crisp and authentic, with believable characters and honest nods to dysfunction: “Because family and opioids really aren’t so different,” he writes. “Both can make you feel great until suddenly they don’t.”
There’s lots of sadness here, but also survival, growth and hope.
