How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

The cliche goes, “never judge a book by its cover”. It turns out, in the case of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, it is made evident that the reader has been living a lie, a terribly wonderful lie. The hard cover reveals a woman suspended in the air, seemingly surpassing the boundaries of known physics as she remains, arms spread, head held back, legs bent, caught in the midst of a limitless sky.

The author, Connie May Fowler starts the book ominously with the summer solstice reaching 92 degrees at 7 a.m. in the small town of Hope, Florida. Throughout the story, the Floridian swamp heat acts as a proverbial pressure cooker, minus the outlet. The plot revolves around Clarissa Burden, a best-selling author, somewhat voluntarily confined to the grips of her historical boondocks home, thanks to her lack of assertiveness towards her mentally abusive Afrikaner husband. While her oh-so-infamous “artist” husband photographs nude twenty-somethings in Clarissa’s garden escape, she is preoccupied by writer’s block brought on by the energy exerted from imagining spousal death scenarios.

The story starts off with immense anxiety, not only caused by the heat, but by Clarissa’s subservient attitude towards her clearly, two-timing husband. Her doormat mindset coupled with denial brings about a paradoxical sense of hopelessness yet excitement, knowing and hoping that somehow, Clarissa Burden will eventually snap.

While Clarissa is a very dynamic character (the dynamic aspects being the whole reason for the book) most of the other characters are stagnant. The author makes no attempts at making the reader feel some sort of compassion for the indifferent, selfish, downer husband. In fact, Fowler manages to place him in the category of Clarissa’s mentally abusive, alcoholic mother. Though he is clearly the villain, Fowler does not hide the fact that Clarissa -being the breadwinner, owner of the house and joint owner of the only safely functional car- is in this predicament due to her own accord. Though her imagination runs wild with death scenarios, alter-ego super heroes donning “cerulean boots” and “ovarian shadow women”, she rarely fights back when her husband calls her names in Afrikaner dialect…or in English, for that matter.

Watching Clarissa develop was a suspenseful joy. Thanks to a series of spectacular and metaphysical events, the heroine was placed on the path of confidence and freedom. Clarissa’s development is reminiscent of a flower coming to full bloom or a caterpillar emerging as a beautiful, daring, badass butterfly (with cerulean boots).

One unique aspect of this book is that all 276 pages take place in 24 hours. Despite being a day long story, the pages remain abundant due to the author’s constant use of imagery manifested through, primarily, animals and ghosts. For example, a fly that has grown quite infatuated with our heroine. Another, theme that resonates throughout the book is that everything is bigger than what we observe, yet somehow it is all relative (which explains why the opening quote read “E=mc2). In every action, we affect people, animals, ghosts and places in ways we will never know. Even a fly, a small, seemingly useless creature serves a bigger purpose in the sense of character development, imagery and philosophical ideology.

Overall, I think that the book will strike the chords in self-conscious women’s hearts. Unlike many stories with abused women -mentally or physically- this book is more optimistic and empowering, than anything.

Fowler pulls the reader in with sweeping imagery and intense character development leaving you empowered in relation to other humans yet humble to the fact that though you have a place in the universe, life will go on whether you choose to live it the way you want to or not. With that, as I took in the last page and learned how Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, I couldn’t help but ask: How will I learn to fly?

How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly