suicide

Obsessive Tactics in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Obsessive Tactics in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

In Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, the narrator Helen Moran investigates her adopted brother’s suicide, an effort complicated by Helen’s own profound alienation. Relentlessly interior, discursive and associative, the novel reads as the direct outcome of Helen’s grief, an inner crisis she attempts to control with obsessive tactics that give the novel its form.