Gayle Brandeis' Backstory

The Book of The Book of Dead Birds

I happened upon a dead bird when I was walking home from school with my friend Sonja Johnson in first grade. It was a baby bird—it didn’t have any feathers yet; its eyes had never opened. It looked so bald, so vulnerable, splayed there on the sidewalk. It was the first time I had seen death up close. I was deeply shaken.

Later, in my room, I pulled a glass case out of my cabinet. I had begged my parents to buy it for me in Chinatown; inside, two yellow-feathered birds perched on a branch in front of a painting of cherry blossoms. I set it on my desk, then sat next to Sonja on the bed.

"We have to look at this and think about what that bird could have become," I said in a very solemn voice. "It never got to fly. It never got to build a nest, lay an egg." I went on and on. Then I said "Now is the time when we cry." Sonja and I sat on my Holly Hobby comforter and forced ourselves to wail.

In 1996, I started writing a poem about that experience. The poem was slippery; it quickly morphed into a piece about all the dead birds I’ve come across in my life, then kept getting longer and longer and stranger and stranger. At some point, I realized it didn’t want to be about my own experience any more; it didn’t want to be a poem any more, either. I wasn’t sure what it wanted to be, so I set it aside and moved on to other projects.

In the meanwhile, articles started to appear in the newspaper about massive bird die-offs at the Salton Sea in the California desert, about an hour and a half from my home in Riverside. I clipped them and pasted them into a notebook. I knew they were somehow connected to my dead bird poem, but I wasn’t sure how everything fit together. Then I happened to stumble across a documentary on PBS called "The Women Outside" about women who were forced into prostitution on US military bases in Korea. All of a sudden, two characters--Ava and Helen, a daughter who had an unfortunate habit of killing her mother’s beloved birds, a mother with a painful past—materialized in my imagination.

I knew I had found my story, but I resisted it for a long time. I didn’t think I had any right to write the story of a Korean woman and her Black-Korean-American daughter. Their experience was so outside my own-- I knew very little about Korean culture--and I was worried about being perceived as a cultural imperialist by taking on their story. The characters were persistent, though. I couldn’t help but start to research, start to write.

At first, I wrote the novel in third person because I thought it would give me some necessary distance; I thought I could observe the characters with respect and compassion without presuming to claim their voices. Even though I loved the characters deeply, the story felt flat. I was ready to throw it away on more than one occasion. Then two things happened:

First, a dead crow appeared on my patio. This seemed like too clear of a sign to ignore. I forced myself to return to my manuscript, forced myself to keep plugging away. Next, I came down with a horrible case of strep throat. I had a high fever--so high, I began to hallucinate. I ended up having a series of fever dreams in which I became my main character, Ava. It became very clear that Ava wanted to tell her own story, in her own voice. This was terrifying; it felt too intimate, too risky. She was insistent, though. She wanted to narrate the book.

I started a radical revision of my manuscript as soon as the fever broke. The story came back to life for me. Ava’s voice rang out loud and true, both on the page and under my skin. I felt like I had finally found the form that my poem had been searching for, a form that could give voice to so many who had been voiceless, that could give voice to a beleaguered landscape, as well. Despite all of our differences, I feel closer to Ava than any character I have ever written. I am so grateful for what she has taught me, where she has taken me. I am so grateful that she reminded me about how fiction can allow us to enter other skins, to increase our capacity for connection and compassion.

A week before the novel came out, a reporter and a photographer from my local paper came over to my house to do a feature about the release. The photographer honed in on the bench on our front porch as a good place for the portrait. She walked over to it, then said "Do you have a broom or something? There’s a dead bird over here." Sure enough, right where she wanted me to sit, there was a dead baby bird--featherless, its eyes still closed, just like the one I saw when I was six, the one that launched the poem that led to the novel that was just about to be launched, itself. After the newspaper people left, my daughter and I buried the bird and had a little ritual--with real tears--to honor its life. I felt my own life swoop around, full circle. I felt Ava and Helen swoop off into the world, the dead bird setting them free at last.

The Book of Dead Birds is Gayle Brandeis’ first novel.