So I'm almost finished with Sonali Deraniyagala's eyewitness account of the 2004 Indonesia tsunami, where she lost her husband, two sons, mother and father. Her description of the storm surge itself is riveting, the confusion and panic afterward.
But that only takes up one chapter.
Afterward she has to come to grips with her loss. Here she loses her mind a little bit, yelling at people, hating happy couples she sees, refusing to answer questions or move on with her life. For FOUR YEARS she basically kept herself locked up in her apartment, drinking heavily and contemplating suicide. A Dutch family moves into her parent's home in Indonesia, where she grew up, and she begins harassing them -- calling at all hours of the night, ringing their doorbell and running away, parking her car outside the gate and blaring music as loud as she can. She became quite psychotic.
I almost didn't believe the story -- in interviews the author looks quite calm and collected -- but some quick Googling appears to confirm her story is genuine.
That's not the weird part though.
All through the book she drops little tidbits about her family, glimpses of their life before the tragedy. The weird part, which I've never seen a reviewer mention, is that her son Malli had severe gender dysphoria. He played with dolls, wore dresses including a pink tutu, liked ballet slippers, wanted to carry a baby in his tummy, and wore lipstick. Each of these little clues is dropped anonymously into the narrative, but if you add them up you get a pretty clear picture. Funny the author herself never comments on it.
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