Review: The Ordeal by Josephine Walden

A tender memoir covering events that will surprise the reader as much as they did the author, The Ordeal: A Journey from Misfortunes, Illness and Betrayal to Truth by Josephine Walden inspects the reliability of memory and reveals the bitter pull of greed.

Josie Walden was a nurse and psychiatric nurse-counselor whose mysterious, debilitating illnesses often rendered her incapable of doing her job, On top of that, she also experienced unanticipated natural disasters that drained her finances. It was during these years that she and her older sister, Julie, were faced with their parents’ declining health, eventual deaths, and the settling of their estate. Walden relates the journey of her book’s subtitle through a retelling of her struggles and how she discovered and then attempted to deal with a shocking betrayal.

The book is organized in chapters that chronologically record the years 1983 through 2008, and Walden is dedicated to including all of the events and conversations that took place during these years. Her memory of these years is impressive – to be able to recall whole conversations between the many people who populate the book, including daughters, aunts, nieces, neighbors, and lawyers, is a monumental feat given the long span of time during which the events took place. However, that commitment leads to a fair amount of repetition, both in the relating of incidents and in the reconstructed dialogue, which often includes the same issues being debated again and again without resolution.

Complicating the structure, which is meant to show the progression of events that lead to Walden discovering the deceptions, are chapters that digress to describe the sisters’ childhood and upbringing and background stories about other family members and relatives – biographical material that seems out of place, as some of these sections don’t seem connected to the book’s purpose, and without author commentary or context feel misdirected. The work as a whole would have benefited from editing that focused on “The perfect storm of events” – as the cover description implies – with multiple similar scenarios being condensed to replace some of the repetition, or narrative tangents.

In a work that is attempting to show Walden’s initial inability to see what was happening – despite warnings from several people very close to her who she trusted – and then her slow and appalling discovery, chapters loaded down with peripheral minutiae make the book seem more concerned with inclusion than with the pertinent facts and particular emotional truths that would give the eventual discovery more power. In one way, these details showcase the number of distractions Walden may have had that she wasn’t able to see what was in front of her, but they also distract the reader. Although Walden’s voice is honest and earnest and elicits sincere empathy for her medical, financial, and familial problems, her focus on unrelated, or undramatic events gets in the way of the book’s overall theme.

Overall, however, one can’t help but be drawn into Walden’s story and her hardships, which provide an especially vivid window into what it’s like to live with chronic fatigue. Ultimately celebrating resilience, trust, and the real meaning of family, The Ordeal is an engaging and affecting story.