In this collection of literary profiles, Emma Comery weaves together interviews and research to explore what it means to be the partner of someone in the military. These depictions offer an intimate narrative of the marriages, family dynamics, and interior lives of military partners: the young wife of an intelligence officer who finds herself in the middle of Nevada, a Marine Corps spouse caught in the crossfire of a foreign riot, a therapist who recognizes the signs of mental illness in her own husband, and a new mother who doesn't know she's kissing her husband goodbye for the last time.
Have You Landed? offers nuanced portraits of life across the U.S. military – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and National Guard – and includes the experiences of wives, husbands, partners, widows, and exes. It describes life as a modern military partner and the commitment to a lifestyle that often challenges our notions of love, family, strength, and self.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Author's Note
Part 1
The Leaving
I Wake on a Mission
Madelyn
Paige
Part 2
The Haunting
Katarina
Tirzah
Camille
Part 3
Hunting Season
Travis
Winnie
Tanya
Part 4
Have You Landed?
Jamie
Jessa
Heidi
Part 5
In the Pouting Room
Lucy
Sybil
Zoey
Proof of Life
The Returning
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author :
Emma Comery is a writer and the assistant director of communications for one of the largest veteran services organizations in Texas. Her work has appeared in The Bend Magazine, Military Families Magazine, Reserve and National Guard Magazine, Arts and Letters Journal, Line of Advance, and Poets.org.
Review :
"Equal parts tender and unblinking, Have You Landed? is a generous and deeply immersive portrait of the most intimate proximities to military life. More than that, though, it's a record of the profound power, complexity, and dignity inherent in an individual life, and of the constellation of ways we are – all of us – part of greater wholes. Lyric, loving, restrained, and searching, these essays will echo in my head for a long time to come."—Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I've Taken My Body: Essays
"Immersive, intimate, and reminiscent of Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, Have You Landed? has the quality of a song performed in moving harmony. Each voice is its own, but, together, they create a sound that is at once stoic, brave, and tender. For me, this collection did what the best books do: It reminded me that I am never alone."—Simone Gorrindo, author of The Wives: A Memoir
"In Have You Landed? Emma Comery rewrites and broadens what we know of military living. The context here – the quiet details of a life inside the imperative distance – shine a light on what love looks like to servicemen and civilians caring for country and home. After years interviewing those enlisted and those military-adjacent—spouses, lovers, widows, exes, those willing and honest enough to open the door to their distinct reality – Comery reframes their experiences by crafting nuanced portraits of deployment, foreign emergencies, PTSD, living within, and living without. There's no hiding what's hardest here: infertility, fraught faith, child rearing, relocation, death, devastation, war. Perhaps the figures depicted made time and space for inquiry because they grasped that someone in the future would desperately need a portrait of what they'd already survived, and despite the distance and difficulty, learn how they might thrive. To be a military partner is to know that the calling away can happen with no warning and all must endure despite this. The hope is that everyone caught in the fray comes out stronger, closer, whole. Have You Landed? is here to remind us all that 'sometimes the leaving feels like falling apart, and sometimes it feels like falling in love.'"—Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up
