Guess What’s Different

“With honesty that stuns and a mastery of emotional description, Guess What’s Different is true and unequivocal soul work. Susan Triemert bravely charts pain and loss, hope and new motherhood, grief and the polaroid fade of memory, all with an abiding love and an insistence that the stories we tell mean something, that all those tiny moments matter. These essays, each of them masterstrokes, become vital snapshots in an even more brilliant whole. Triemert is an essayist of staggering skill, and Guess now ranks among my favorite books. This is what it looks like when an artist stands at the height of their powers.”

“‘One cannot protect a cloud from the sharp winds—nor can a prayer make someone love you,” writes Susan Triemert in her debut essay collection, Guess What’s Different, which does the astonishing work of reminding us that the desire to be loved is love itself and that such love guarantees one will never be ‘orphaned’ in the world, not by grief nor silence nor the failure of memory. With language tender in its detail and heartbreakingly sad, Triemert reflects on the loss of her parents and the adoption of her sons, building for herself ‘a place where every being who lives here has been chosen, a place where everyone belongs.’ Guess What’s Different is one such place for the reader as well—a home that puts striking, moving language to those feelings of anxiety, desertion, and all things love.”

“In her debut collection of loosely connected essays, Susan Triemert exposes a riveting family history. Lyric moments of grief, reflection, and survival weave through like a bright elusive thread—just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, her next essay will leave you gasping for breath and turning the page as you wait for the next story to unfold. With an unflinching hand that embraces innovative forms, she is just as comfortable breaking your heart as she is mending it on the next turn. Guess What’s Different is like a magic trick—building itself up out of emptiness; balancing one loss against another; and adding in precise amounts of beauty, humor, and honesty until Triemert has conjured from the remnants an intimate portrait of what it truly means to be a family, rough edges and all.”