July 18, 2016
At one point in this memoir, Trussoni (Falling Through the Earth) finds herself pregnant and on extended bed rest in a hospital in Bulgaria, speaking no Bulgarian. Filled with incidents like this, Trussoni’s is a memoirist’s dream life, ripe for storytelling, and she’s an expert at it. As the story begins, she is a single mother dating a Bulgarian author on a visa visit to the U.S. He is sensitive, brilliant, and appealingly eccentric; he is also duplicitous, but she doesn’t like thinking about that. His visa expires and he sells her on the romance of a quick trip to Bulgaria to get it renewed; the visa requires, he fails to mention, that he stay in Bulgaria for two years. Startled, but still game, she marries him and has a daughter. More deceptions follow, and in an unconventional bid to save her failing marriage, she moves the family to a medieval fortress in a French village. Her husband becomes unbalanced, installing locks on the interior doors of their house and carving Tibetan symbols for death on his office door, yet he accuses her of suffering from mental illness. His gall draws her into a gutter fight to extract herself and her children. It’s a powerful story, and she has the fortitude and the judgment to do it justice.