A Mini-Essay on Six Goodbyes We Never Said for #ENGL669
Candace Ganger’s Six Goodbyes We Never Said (2019) introduces readers to two teenage protagonists, Naima Rodriguez and Dew Brickman, coping with the trauma of losing their parents. In her novel, Ganger employs several unique formatting choices in order to show how both characters attempt to navigate such loss and their ongoing struggles with mental health. Rather than being organized into chapters, sections begin with details from the lives of the main characters. Either before or after each point-of-view section from Naima, Ganger usually provides a voicemail left on Naima’s cell phone from her father, Staff Sergeant Raymond K. Rodriguez, who volunteered for another tour in Afghanistan after promising Naima he would stay. The first prose section informs readers of the passing of the Staff Sergeant, so these voicemails give readers important glimpses into his character voice and his concern for Naima. They also supply information about Naima’s struggles in the past school year through the passage of his time overseas, rather than giving summaries in the prose. One example of these reads, “If anyone messes with you again, go straight to the principal. If you won’t tell me, please tell Nell or JJ or Kam. We’re trying to help” (209). An unsent email draft from Naima follows each of these voicemails, and these sections offer some of the closest perspectives into Naima’s mindset. The emails often contain a mixture of prose and poetry, similar to other moments in the text where Naima’s point-of-view sections slip into verse, which happens when her OCD or GAD flare up. Ganger’s freeform writing style—playing with indentation and sentence format—during these passages reinforces that struggle. Dew’s sections, on the other hand, contain mostly prose, but we’re invited into his experience with the heading of each section. One way Dew deals with his anxiety is through recording his life as if he’s a news reporter, so at the top of his sections, there’s a series of remote control symbols, the length of the recording, and some kind of quote written in Dew’s reporter persona. These will usually be something like “In today’s top stories, virgin Virgos make great friends, not so great espresso” (83). Occasionally, like when he meets Naima, Dew talks in a similar voice, but not always, so these moments give insight into how Dew manages the loss of both of his own parents, along with foreshadowing section events through Dew’s unique sense of humor. Also worth mentioning are the occasional short sections where Ganger slips into a third person point-of-view, usually to present background information, like in “A Summary of Naima’s Medical History” (42) and “August Moon and the Paper Hearts: ‘Fire’” (68), two of the longer examples. The sections do create distance from the main characters; however, they serve Ganger and readers well by giving little important details about the characters, like Dew’s connection to strawberry cake, through an unfiltered lens. Still, the sections in third person act as the least purposeful formatting choice in comparison to the rest of the novel. Throughout the novel, Ganger conveys some very important traumas and coping strategies through her specific formatting choices.
