Out of the Dark: A Memoir by Marian Elliot
While still devastated by the unspeakable loss of her only son, Marian is pulled into a quagmire of grief, barely able to move at all. In that darkness she sleeps, unwilling to let go. As her first summer of loss wanes, Marian's husband convinces her to take off alone on an ill-advised road trip to Alaska. So she begins an 8,000-mile trek from the East Cost of the US through Canada aiming for the Native village of Toksook Bay — with winter in the wings and her beloved son's dog by her side.
Bruised and broken with unresolved grief, she is at first blind to the fact that her husband wants her out of the picture. When the fog lifts and her vision clears his tactics are revealed, and she learns that her suspicions were right on. This betrayal keeps her heading north into the icy chill of early winter. Could she stay married to a man who would blame her, gaslight her and then reel her back in?
As she works her way through the loss of every passed connection and out of the dark, new questions loom, what might Alaska offer?
A travelogue of grief, Out of the Dark resonates with any heart that has ever been shattered by loss or betrayal. After a tragic accident, Jeanne journeys through the worst any mother or wife might be asked to endure. A deeply moving portrait of courage, Elliott’s memoir explores how the dark night of the soul can find passage through pain to a place of radiance and hope. A touching and beautifully rendered story.
— Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, author of A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising My Sons in Alaska, Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith, and Our Perfect Wild: Ray and Barbara Bane’s Journeys and the Fate of the Far North
A beautifully rendered hero's journey and classic road trip story, Out of the Dark is one woman's passage from the known to the unknown as she drives not so much as away from, but into the embrace of, a painful reality that nothing could change. Told in prose as beautiful as sunlight in a dark Alaskan January that finally finds its way above the shadowy hills, Marian Elliott's third person memoir is a testament to the magnitude of love, the kindness of strangers, and the healing power of nature.
— Sarah Birdsall, the author of The Red Mitten, The Moonflower Route, and Wild Rivers, Wild Rose
Cirque Press Author — Marian Elliott
Marian Elliott was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn, NY and the Long Island suburbs before moving to Alaska when she was 42. When she retired from 35 years of teaching young children, she turned her time and energy to creative writing. Her short story, “In Its Place,” won first place for fiction in the Open to the Public category of the creative writing contest sponsored by the University of Alaska, Anchorage and the Anchorage Daily News. It was published in the May 2017 issue of We Alaskans and the November/December issue of Event Horizon literary magazine. She and her husband Dan divide their time between their home at their apple orchard in Wasilla, Alaska and their cabin in the foothills of the Talkeetna Mountains.