The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting: A Memoir

Amidst the fog of San Francisco, a debut author reflects on his brother's life and suicide in this "painful, intimate, and exquisitely written" memoir (Peter Orner). In San Francisco, the summer fog blows inland off the ocean and the landscape changes from moment to moment. Amidst this ever-changing sea of fog, thirty year old Kyle Boelte struggles to remember his brother Kris, who committed suicide in their family's Denver home when Boelte was just thirteen. In a dual narrative that weaves together climate and personal history, Boelte explores letters, notes, newspaper articles, and his own memory to tell the story of his brother's short life while also investigating the science behind San Francisco's omnipresent fog. Boelte's search takes him from San Francisco Bay circa 1901, when the fog was responsible for routinely sinking steamships, to a cavernous medical library where he studies the grim details of asphyxiation and death by hanging; from the redwood forests where scientists are now learning about the fog's ability to sustain life, to a beat-up cardboard box containing memories of his long-dead brother. The Beautiful Unseen is a "slim book of startling prose" that "slips between past and present, inner life and outer, seamlessly and beautifully" to tell a story of loss at an early age, the impermanence of memory, the science of fog, and the history of San Francisco (Darin Strauss).

About the Author :
Kyle Boelte was born in a small town on the high plains of Kansas, grew up near Denver, Colorado, and moved to San Francisco as an adult. A finalist for the Annie Dillard Award, his writing has appeared in "Orion Magazine," "The Rumpus," and "High Country News."

Review :
"Kyle Boelte's The Beautiful Unseen confronts one family's profoundest grief with a searing honesty."--Peter Orner, author of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories "I was utterly transported, felt surely the fog was pooling outside my own window. Kyle Boelte's haunting debut put me in mind [of] Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It. I can't think of higher praise than that." --Joe Wilkins, The Mountain and the Fathers "The Beautiful Unseen is its own weather system: soulful, unpredictable, shadow then light." --Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge "It's that rare, treasured thing: a moving portrait of loss that never settles for easy answers." --Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life "Consider The Beautiful Unseen as an honest and eloquent guide to an uncharted landscape of loss, in which Kyle Boelte has done the brutal and tender mapping of a story that fills the silence, that gives us permission to mourn, and honor, those dead by their own hand." --Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land "In subtle, pitch-perfect prose, The Beautiful Unseen weaves a narrative of deep personal loss with an unusual natural history. The pattern that emerges is achingly beautiful and absolutely unforgettable." --Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld "Like Annie Dillard, [Boelte] blends meteorology, memory, and mystery into a gift of grace. --Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort