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February 27, 2026
from The Tender Land: A Family Love Story
by Kathleen Finneran
“Right away Kathleen Finneran uses up the main point, the fact that she calls out Sean’s name when she sees something new—Sean, the brother who killed himself when he was fifteen. But then she does this lovely thing…”—THE
In honor of Kathleen Finneran, who died on February 14, we reprise our 2015 feature on her memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, about her family’s struggle to cope with the suicide of her brother Sean when he was fifteen. It is a patient and thoughtful work that allows the different but complexly interlocking lives of her family to unfold before us, her portraits of shared pain, individual guilt, heartbreaking confusions and failures, and moments of ordinary beauty all drawn clearly and, yes, tenderly. The most moving portrait is her own as she reveals her special bond to Sean whose mind was as curious and hungry for the world as hers.​
The Paragraph of the Week
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Once I saw a red jellyfish that had washed up on the shore of an island in the north Pacific. I knelt down next to it, feeling almost humbled by its beauty. It was the first jellyfish I’d ever seen, and as with every new encounter, I had the urge to call out to you. “Sean,” I say when no one’s around. It was a gray autumn day. The ocean and the sky were nearly the same color. On the beach, the jellyfish looked like a glossy spill, dark maroon at its center, lighter and lighter red toward its edges, the whole shimmering expanse of it covering a wide circle of sand. Every few seconds it heaved and collapsed from its center, sending a ripple out from the dark maroon spot to paler parts of its body. I knelt there, watching it. I want to touch it, but I was afraid. A woman walked by with her dog. “You’ve never seen a jellyfish?” she asked as the dog sniffed the sand around it. She stood with me for a moment. “If you’re thinking you can save it, you can’t,” she said. She was a native, accustomed to what happened near those waters. I was not. She signaled to her dog, and they continued down the beach. I watched the jellyfish a while longer. I wanted to touch it while it was still living. I knew nothing about jellyfish. Would it sting me? Burn me? These are the things you would know, Sean, the things you could tell me. I reached out and touched its maroon middle. When it moved again, sending a single beat through its body, a faint warmth rose up, leaving my hand coated with mucus. I walked to the water and washed it off, and when I returned, the jellyfish was no longer breathing.
—Kathleen Finneran
Commentary
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I like the way this passage builds. Right away Kathleen Finneran uses up the main point, the fact that she calls out Sean’s name when she sees something new—Sean, the brother who killed himself when he was fifteen. But then she does this lovely thing: she draws us in sensually. The canvas is bare—the time of day when beach and sky look the same—and the jellyfish itself is ordinary, like a “glossy spill,” but rewards a steady gaze: “dark maroon at the center, lighter and lighter red toward its edges, the whole shimmering expanse of it covering a wide circle.” We see right away that it is in trouble, in the wonderful verbs “heaved” and “collapsed” used to describe the maroon center, and the “pale edge” of the creature seems already lifeless, a part of the bland canvas it is becoming. We feel, like Finneran, the urge to place a finger on this creature, feel invited but afraid of this slimy goo. We are entering the arena of the taboo, which is the urge to touch what we fear, releasing powerful forces. And then, this woman with her dog lumbers into the scene. How many times does Finneran do that in this book—have someone blunder in at a climactic moment? I love the tone of the woman. It is a reminder that when we have entered holiness, that set-apart place in life, we look a little stupid to others, right? Holiness is a private state and those outside can only sniff at the edges curious at our ecstasy and a little dismissive. By this time, the work of the passage is largely done, and all Finneran can do is mess it up by overdoing its effects, so I like the way she handles the actual touching of the jellyfish by downplaying it. Unlike her mother, Finneran is not a believer. For her what matters are the worldly wonders, all that Sean has missed, like this mysterious jellyfish. The jellyfish doesn’t sting. It doesn’t burn. When she touches it she feels its warmth, the warmth of life, but quickly washes that off her finger. She is not transported because that would be false to her and her book. The jellyfish is no angel, that central image for others in The Tender Land. The death is not sublime. The creature just stops breathing. But so for a moment do we.
—THE
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Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
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A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
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by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
