Book Review: F*ckface and Other Stories by Leah Hampton
by Michelle Hogmire
The Haint’s co-founder and I chatted on the phone the other night — something that’s become much more difficult to schedule during the pandemic, while we’re both dealing with increasingly unpredictable and long work hours. He’d recently visited the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia over the July 4th weekend and noticed a new swath of luxury condos going up outside the outlet stores that had upended our childhood mall. We’d gotten into a back-and-forth bashing of the absurd argument that “the Eastern Panhandle isn’t really WV.”
For context: the Eastern Panhandle is a weird bird, both historically and in the present (as if there’s any real difference in Appalachia). It’s an area that WV and Virginia fought over during The Civil War state split: a rich land of rivers and railroads that includes Harpers Ferry, as well as the city of Martinsburg (which passed between Union and Confederate control 37 times). Currently, it’s considered a metropolitan area of both Baltimore and DC, which means that people who move for work in either city are encouraged to live in the Eastern Panhandle and commute. This explains why the Panhandle has seen population increases, while the rural Southern part of the state seems to be in perpetual decline.
“So it’s not that the Eastern Panhandle is any different from the rest of WV, it’s just that more outsiders live there, and they’re building things for those outsiders,” my friend said. “You can totally tell who grew up there and who didn’t. There’s a sharp divide.” No one we knew was going to live in those condos. To feel better about the situation, we started joking about shitty defunct local businesses that the condo-dwellers missed out on. Humor is an important defense mechanism against the harsh reality: some of the orchards around my parents’ house that used to employ migrant workers are now housing developments for wealthier city employees.
These intertwining themes — of insiders and outsiders, of access to land and space, of the past and the present, of sorrow and laughter — are tackled directly in Leah Hampton’s gloriously quick-witted and unashamedly melancholic Appalachian debut short story collection F*ckface and Other Stories (Henry Holt: July 14, 2020). Over the course of twelve single-word-titled tales about contemporary rural living, Hampton nails the complex politics, genuine diversity, and gorgeous mountains of the place I’m proud to call home.
While mainstream media representations of Appalachia tend to focus on individualistic conservative white male narratives, Hampton’s work is filled with working class women/female-identified folks and/or members of the LGBTQIA and BIPOC communities (in other words, “y’all”). We get characters like Pretty from the title story “Fuckface,” a closeted young woman with a dead-end job at the local Food Country grocery store, who loses a chance at love. Or Coralis from “Parkway,” a Native American park ranger who instructs a lesbian named Priscilla in the art of spotting dead bodies dumped on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Then there’s the perfectly named Iva Jo Hocutt from “Twitchell,” who seeks comfort in a community of women while coping with breast cancer caused by the chemical company of the story’s title.
All of these pieces circle issues of land and contemplate questions about use and misuse of the environment, as well as concerns about access. Who’s allowed to say what happens to these mountains? In an unsettling environmental piece called “Frogs,” twins Frank and Carolyn attend a lecture by a naturalist at a local university-funded biological station:
Frank worked at the paper mill in town, the one the university activists called a scourge and kept trying to close. The one tourists complained about because of its industrial smells, its unsightly smokestack interrupting their mountain views.
Carolyn and Frank had lived in the mountains all their lives. […] Neither knew anything about the local ecology.
This framing begs the question: what do these activists and tourists propose Frank do for work instead? Are they advocating for well-paid training and jobs in sustainable energy for working class people? It’s unclear.
What is clear is that both Frank and Carolyn feel unprepared and awkward on the nature tour; they’re treated like ignorant outsiders (despite the fact that they’re likely the only locals present), especially by the naturalist himself. At first, Carolyn worries, asking, “Are we rednecks?” Then, she gets good and pissed: “I’m nicer to [nature] than he is. […] I don’t act like it belongs to me.”
Similar to issues of land, the links between past and present are inextricable from Hampton’s stories. The horrors of slavery and Native American displacement loom, and it’s often impossible to avoid past trauma in small rural hollers where everyone knows everyone else. In “Devil,” a gay soldier realizes he’ll never change the bigoted, religiously intolerant parents who raised him. But the piece “Wireless” perhaps tackles this issue the most explicitly, at least on an individual level. The main character, Margaret Price, no longer feels comfortable where she grew up. The reason why? The man who abused her has married into her family. Margaret can no longer go home, in a very literal sense, because it’s impossible for her to be safe there.
Despite the depressing situation Margaret’s dealing with, she still approaches life and new romantic prospects with a stubborn sense of humor — a characteristic possessed by Appalachian people in spades. Someone please give Leah Hampton an award for penning some of the funniest opening lines I’ve ever read, including this one from Margaret’s tale: “The Holiday Inn Express on Richland Skyway seemed like as good a place as any for Margaret Price to maybe, possibly, stick her finger up a guy’s butthole.” Second place definitely goes to this opener from the title story: “Nothing’ll ever fix what’s broken in this town, but it would be nice if they’d at least get the dead bear out of the parking lot at Food Country.” This simultaneous upset and hilarity is endemic to life where I’m from — a place that we both despise and also love to defend, an area that contains both great tragedy and wonderful beauty. This attitude is precisely stated in the story “Mingo”; when the main character tells her father-in-law’s physical therapist that Harlan, KY is nice, he scoffs, “Boy, you must really come from the back of nothing if you think Harlan’s worth a compliment.” Although, you best believe: if she’d spoken a single word against the place, he would’ve given her even more shit.
Even though Hampton’s collection is contemporary, you probably noticed that I’ve made it this far in my review without mentioning Trump. But unfortunately, for Appalachians, it’s an issue that has to be addressed — the way that mainstream media makes the region a monolith, declaring the place “Trump Country” without any caveats. In reality, national politics often slips to the background of working-class lives, local day-to-day existence being a more immediate concern. Hampton beautifully explores this concept in “Boomer,” which tells the story of Larry, a firefighter whose marriage and home is falling apart while the 2016 election lurks on the periphery. Larry, along with Cherokee firefighters, has been working long days, trying to control a blaze that’s ravaging the land. The election is an annoyance on TV after work:
The television bickered in the living room — one of the news channels. Her body blocked some of the arguments roiling out of the speakers, but the voices still carried and rattled Larry’s teeth.
He’s gonna win, May said, closing her eyes. That pig. Listen to him.
Larry told her to turn it off.
Larry’s days are filled with hard labor and overwhelming tragedy. He constantly reiterates that “everyone [he] knew would lose their home” and pointedly states that “none of this made the news.” When a fire behaviorist from Virginia finally shows up, it’s to control a burn near a golf course, “to save the condos and rental cabins.” Meanwhile, May is gradually removing her items from the house, including her water bottle with an “I’m With Her” sticker. The election happens. As someone who grew up in Appalachia, I knew there was an important paragraph coming, but despite this realization, I still started crying as soon as I read it:
Rain would not come. Another blaze rising out of Transylvania would soon join theirs, doubling the conflagration. In Tennessee, people were dying, suffocating in their cars as they tried to escape. That, at least, had made the papers, alongside all the stories blaming mountain people for picking the president. Larry didn’t know anyone who’d had time to vote.
Trump doesn’t represent the totality of the modern Appalachian narrative, and neither do the condos. Not even close. But I can’t help but think that if the fictional condos were prioritized in Larry’s story, the real ones in my hometown would be too — if a disaster struck. Or maybe it’s more accurate and honest to say when. This brings me back to the essential question: who’s allowed to say what happens to these mountains? And, if Appalachians aren’t the ones allowed a say, what stories of us will remain?
