“Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life,” Siobhan Fallon writes in You Know When the Men Are Gone, a collection of loosely connected stories about experience of Army wives and their soldier husbands deploying from Fort Hood, Texas.
Fallon, who received her MFA from the New School in New York, draws from her own experience living at Fort Hood. Her husband, an officer in the Army, has been deployed three times—once to Afganistan and twice to Iraq. Today, the couple lives in Monterey, where Fallon’s husband is enrolled at the Defense Language Institute. They’ll soon leave for Jordan.
“It was a bit of a culture shock,” Fallon said of having new, nonmilitary neighbors, “I was so used to having deployment topics as fodder for small talk and suddenly I was in a place where that was no longer a shared experience.”
You Know When the Men Are Gone is a portrait of the war that most civilians don’t see. In spare prose, Fallon relates the many ways that a battle raging overseas is mirrored in the domestic lives of soldiers’ families. Her characters are lonely women wracked with insecurity, wondering if their husbands will be the same men when they return, and scared men wondering if their wives will still want them mangled and scarred.
SIOBHAN FALLON will read from her book ‘You Know When The Men Are Gone’ on Thursday, Jan. 27, 7:30pm at Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st Ave., Capitola. 831.462.4415. Free.
