Gerry Turcotte’s Flying in Silence is a book of boyhood memoirs and family secrets, yet it creates a genre all its own. It contains an anatomy of depression and speaks of a family’s inability to cohere. Nevertheless, it swells with compassion and a deep commitment to life and living.

Our male narrator is an astute observer and analyst. At times, he is a young boy, in the midst of his experiences, informed but untainted by the adult voice he will later adopt. Other times he is a grown man looking back and trying to make sense of things or continuing his search for meaning.

Both the narrator and author share a mistrust of language. The home we enter and occupy for much of the novel is bilingual. The mother is English-speaking, the father French, and all three family members create an imperfect dialect that combines the best of both worlds and falls into gaps of silence neither can adequately fill. Both parents play with language. The mother reinvents French much to the delight of her in-laws, while the father creates a secret pricing code in his store, the sharing of which with his son is a gift of unparalleled importance.