She Was

Doreen Woods is many things: a successful dentist who donates time and skills to the needy, a loving wife and mother, a sister who cares for her dying brother. She has carefully built an exemplary life. But all of this is threatened when a comrade from the seventies shows up. Over the next week Doreen's past rushes in as she is forced to admit to her family and herself the actions that caused her to change her name and identity three decades earlier.

In 1970 she was impressionable and idealistic Lucy Johansson. When her brother, Adam, came home from Vietnam damaged and bitter, they moved to California, where she raged against the war and the Establishment with many others of her generation. She joined an antiwar group and participated in increasingly militant protests designed to bring attention to their cause and to change the world for the better. But all the best intentions and careful planning couldn't keep things from going terribly wrong.

Told from a twenty-first-century perspective, She Was spans the width of the American continent and the depth of social upheaval of the second half of the twentieth century. She Was explores the violent, determining act in one woman's life that mirrors the formative trauma of her age. She Was is a story about the indelible nature of the past, about hiding in the ordinary, and, ultimately, about making amends.

"Disjointed and anticlimactic, Hallowell's (The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn) take on the far-reaching consequences of Vietnam-era protests gone bad addresses big issues but doesn't quite deliver. Doreen Woods, a successful Colorado dentist, wife and mother, isn't who she seems. Thirty years earlier, she was Lucy Johansson, a Berkeley student and antiwar radical who went underground (with her older brother, Adam) after a bomb she planted at Columbia University as part of a political group called Fishbone fatally detonated. As Doreen, she keeps her past a secret from her husband, Miles, and teenaged son, Ian, until she's confronted by Janey Marks, an old Fishbone friend with a grudge: Janey's husband, Jack, is in jail for explosives possession and Janey is determined to trade Doreen to the FBI for Jack's release. As Doreen struggles with the decision to come clean or run again, Adam is slowly consumed by multiple sclerosis and is frequently awash in flashbacks to his tour in Vietnam. But for all the anxiety, paranoia and violence, the reading experience is oddly flat." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Janis Hallowell is a MacDowell fellow whose short fiction has been published in Ploughshares magazine. She is on the faculties of Denver's Lighthouse for Writers and the Colorado Writers' Workshop and lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter. She Was is her second novel.