Home is Where the Home Is: Simone Gorrindo’s The Wives and Amber Jensen’s The Smoke of You reviewed by Andria Williams

The Wives
Simone Gorrindo
Simon and Schuster, 2024
405 pp.

The Smoke of You
Amber Jensen
MilSpeak Foundation, Inc., 2023
213 pp.

Two recent memoirs, The Wives by Simone Gorrindo and The Smoke of You by Amber Jensen, describe life as military spouses during the Global Wars on Terror in perceptive, heartbreaking, and, thankfully, sometimes humorous ways, illuminating the delicate tightrope walked by families dealing with absences, childbirth and parenting, injury, addiction, post-traumatic stress, and ultimately, the resilience that keeps these families together.

The Wives opens with Gorrindo and her husband, Andrew, moving into their first home at Fort Benning, Georgia, from New York City. “Here come the New York hertics!” Gorrindo jokes. Like many military spouses, the discomfort of leaving home is tempered, at least a little, by the excitement of being on a puzzling adventure, and something even simpler: Getting to live in a house.

“We were going to live in a house. We had never lived in a house before...We won’t have to go to a laundromat,” she marvels. “1300 square feet. Just being inside it made me feel like someone had opened a window in my mind and let in the breeze.”

People can acknowledge the modesty of their first home while also feeling a sudden, dizzying prosperity: most people don’t go into the military because they’re rich. (When my own [former] military husband joined up and suddenly made $1200 a month, I went out and bought a beautiful red LeCreuset cooking pot, something I never would have done before. Oh, the largesse of Uncle Sam!) But for military couples, that house also serves as a complicated symbol, a striving for a stability that home is supposed to provide but may not. In The Smoke of You, Jensen uses the motif of that elusive “home” multiple times, highlighting the relief of having her husband back stateside, coupled with the fact that wartime experience was rendering them incapable of living in the home quite the way they’d imagined. Her husband, a consistently kind man, becomes disproportionately upset over a decorative sign she hangs in the home, which she’d purchased simply because she liked it. She spends long stints sleeping on the couch, or upright in a chair with their newborn. PTSD, and a possibly overprescribed series of opioids to ameliorate the constant pain of Blake’s spinal injury, begin to distance them:

“Deployment was three years in the past, but I didn’t want Blake to feel overwhelmed…Or maybe it was me. Maybe I would never be satisfied…Maybe in that year of solo parenting I’d become too accustomed to doing things my way…Whatever the reasons, I felt, somehow, that even though Blake was there…I was doing it alone. Unmet expectations morphed into resentment, and I drifted away from Blake, sleeping in the living room recliner every night, through the night.”

“Home” is different for both the authors and their husbands; the husbands straddle worlds, sometimes admitting to feeling more at home in combat zones than they do when they come back.

Both Gorrindo and Jensen write movingly about their relationships with their husbands, their children — deeply affected by military service but not wholly defined by it. Their husbands are good people who also show empathy in return toward their wives, even if they are battling inner demons. They are careful to share the particularities and personalities of their husbands, distinct from their own. In that distinction lies the spark of attraction, but also frustration.

“I had wanted to marry Andrew, but I had not wanted to marry a soldier,” Gorrindo writes. “He longed to be of service, to get high on purpose.” That kind of high is hard to dull when one comes back to the mundanity of civilian life, which, you’ll remember, the spouses have been enduring this whole time. She stakes an interesting and insightful claim: “Curiosity, not patriotism, killed the volunteer soldier.”

How does it feel when your husband is more curious about something else, sometimes, than he is about you?

But Gorrindo and Jensen are also curious, and that is why they write. Gorrindo’s anthropological observations of military life are often hilarious, and I chuckled along at the recreational opportunities offered to the wives: shooting range outings (I’ve been offered those, too – I was always a little tempted) and, um, “enticing” opportunities like this: “Bring a package of diapers and enter to win a dinner for two at a fabulous restaurant which hasn’t been determined yet!” (Dinner for two is a little less exciting when your husband is eleven thousand miles away in a combat zone.)

Deployment countdowns, Gorrindo writes beautifully, were “an hourglass lodged in my heart.”

While Gorrindo explores new on-base life with a shrewd eye, Jensen, as a National Guard spouse, is denied the incredibly tight sisterhood that forms under pressure. She is left at home without that very specific group of people who can relate. She has her family, thank god, but must give birth while her husband is away, which seems to me unfathomably lonely. The two experiences highlight the many ways military life can both locate, and dislocate, in turn.

Both The Smoke of You and The Wives are rich reading for anyone interested in family stories, whether civilian or military, or for anyone wishing to understand the way military families have been living under these last forever wars: the sudden or long absences, the anticipated but sometimes unsatisfactory reunions; the endless, endless dealing-with. In the end, I wasn’t able to weather it, myself, of which I am not proud; a fifteen-month deployment at the tail end of 18 years in the military did me in, which is like quitting in the last half-mile of a marathon - but that only increases my respect for the resilience, frankness, and patience of these authors, and the immense generosity of their love. Anyone can walk away from home, but they can also return. And that is where the love is: not in the walking away, but the walking-back.

Andria Williams is the author of the novels The Longest Night and The Waiting World. She was founder of the Military Spouse Book Review and former editor-in-chief of The Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal. She lives in Colorado.