Sunshine State

You know how places can imprint impressions on you – snatches of memories that persist long after most details of a destination have faded away? Things like the scratch of sugar cane against bare legs in Jamaica, the gleam of wet asphalt at Shibuya Crossing, OR the slant of the sun in Santa Fe – images that feel poignant no matter how much time has passed.

Few places are as richly evocative of these strange feelings for me as Florida. In my mind’s eye, Florida is a place of moss-covered manatees, the heat of sun-scorched skin, the door chimes of stores with names like Shell World, and motels mattresses so thin you can feel every spring. It’s the first place I traveled outside of Canada, for a family trip to Disney World of which I remember little beyond fleeing flamingos at our time share, sobbing over Aaliyah’s death, and subsisting on a diet of McDonalds’ quickly-discontinued McSalad Shakers. Years later, I recall grabbing the iron gates of Gianni Versace’s Miami Beach mansion, and later using the condensation from a fishbowl-sized margarita to try to wash the metallic stench from my hands. And even today, I can’t smell aloe vera without being instantly transported to Key Largo, where I suntanned my way to a burn so intense that a tan line is still visible on my thighs more than five years later.

Last month, I spent just eight hours in the state and yet felt instantly like I knew its intimate details – the drone of cicadas, the smell of old fryer oil, and the wide expanses of coastal boulevards. In the aftermath of that blink-and-you’d-miss-it sojourn, I picked up Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State, a book of essays about her life growing up on and returning to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Much like my own memories, Gerard’s writing is a collection of very particular moments and imagery – teen tramp stamps, trespassing on houseboats, exploring the ruins of abandoned houses, people who sue other people for a living, and believing in the power of affirmations to change the course of your life.

Sunshine State was also, unexpectedly but happily, a meditation on the universal features of adolescent angst. She writes of friendships so familiar you come to know every contour of the other person - the slope of their nose, the tilt of their hips, the knobs on their knees:

“I loved you when you grabbed me by the sides of my head and smelled my hair. I do that to my husband now. You do that to your husband now, and to your children. You loved me like a child and a sister and a mother. You were my twin.”

She revels in the shallow pleasures of materialism: of trolling open houses to imagine the alternative lives you might lead and of falling for the empty promises of pyramid schemes:

“In Amway, there is no such thing as contentment. If you’re happy with what you have, you haven’t dreamed, says Amway. Your life could be faster, shinier, brighter, more spacious – don’t settle for less. Join Amway”

And like that Frank O’Hara quote that goes “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern,” Gerard is most winning when gently mocking her own teen efforts to cultivate depth and complexity:

“My journal entries are sprawling and emotionally wrought. A few times I read them aloud to my parents – to communicate something otherwise ineffable? I don’t know. I consider my future persona to be an admixture of Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, and Sylvia Plath. I have a lot of complicated feelings and someday people will care about them.”

That said, Sunshine State is wildly uneven. While Gerard’s best work turns inward, mining her own life and foibles for material, her worst turns outward. Her piece about the history of the Unity Clearwater Church feels more like a Wikipedia entry than a personal essay, while her reporting on a bird sanctuary gone to seed reminds me of my own clumsy college journalism efforts. My advice? Pick the best essays, dispense with the rest, and read them from a bad Kissimmee motel, a crab shack in the Keys, or a butt-burningly hot beach chair in St. Petersburg. You'll never forget the memories you make.