Hide

By: Matthew Griffin

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, Hide is the love story of Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of self-reliant domesticity - Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV - seems to protect them. But when Wendell finds Frank lying motionless outside at the age of 83, their carefully crafted life together begins to unravel. As Frank's physical strength deteriorates and his memory dissolves, Wendell struggles in vain to keep him healthy and to hold onto the man he once knew until, faced with giving care beyond his capacity, he must come to terms with the consequences of half a century in seclusion, the sacrifices they made for each other, and the different lives they might have lived - and most especially the impending, inexorable loss of the one they had.

Impossibly tender, gently funny, and gorgeously rendered, Hide is a singularly powerful debut.

©2016 Matthew Griffin (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Well it started out very interesting but then

It started out so well it gave me ‘Stoner by John Williams vibes and feeling. But then it turned into a version of the 2 grumpy old men muppets in the balcony. The fuzzy feelings I got disappeared by then end and I didn’t like the read or the feelings I felt. The narrator was perfection!

Tender and Profound

Hide by Matthew Griffin is a quietly devastating meditation on love that refuses to announce itself to the world. Griffin's novel follows Wendell and Frank through decades of shared life in rural North Carolina, where their devotion must be carefully concealed behind the mundane rhythms of gardening, taxidermy, and grocery runs. What makes this book remarkable is its refusal to sentimentalize—these men are prickly, stubborn, and sometimes cruel to each other in the way only long-married couples can be, their love expressed not through grand gestures but through the thousand small acts of staying. As Frank's dementia advances, the novel becomes almost unbearably intimate, forcing us to watch Wendell grapple with losing the only witness to his life. Griffin's prose is spare but occasionally breaks open into moments of startling lyricism, particularly when describing the natural world that has been both refuge and prison for these men. This is not a triumphant queer love story but something more honest and perhaps more valuable: a recognition that survival itself, the mere fact of loving someone for fifty years in a world designed to prevent it, is its own form of heroism.

Pleases listen......

....to this novel and consider discussing with your friends and family. Should each individual be allowed to end her/his life when she/he chooses to do so?