Jan Becker’s The Sunshine Chronicles: A Rogue New Yorker Lost in Florida

“The square root of a hurricane is a cycle,” opens Jan Becker’s The Sunshine Chronicles, an odd, inventive collection of curated Facebook posts from the author’s feed. It opens, so to speak, at the close, beginning in the midst of Hurricane Matthew’s devastating landfall on Friday, October 7, 2016 and working backward toward the circumstances that put her there. The writing is poetic, funny, and sharply insightful, meandering from philosophical musings about the nature of life in late-night storms to snarky complaints about her building’s maintenance men - identified only as Creepy Maintenance Man #1 and #2 - to besotted paeans for her beloved, neurotic, elderly cat.

There’s a raw spontaneity to the narrative; while the posts are curated, they lose none of the voyeuristic appeal of scrolling through a stranger’s social media feed. That’s not to condemn the quality of the writing; if Jan Becker is half this entertaining on Facebook, her followers are lucky indeed. However, the book does occasionally run into organizational problems. Each post is far too short to be called a chapter, but there is nothing breaking the narrative into discrete parts: it simply flows, stream of consciousness style, inevitably backwards in time.

A colorful cast of characters - mostly unnamed - populates Becker’s bright, charmingly neurotic world. In addition to the Creepy Maintenance Men and The Feline, there is Becker’s live-in partner, The Chef; The Winemaker, an eccentric and perpetually inebriated houseguest with whom Becker has a long-running feud; her shrink, who insists that Jesus cured his asthma on the radio; an obnoxious goose that Becker christens ‘Donald Trump’; and an oddball child that Becker babysits known only as The Infant - and later, The Toddler - as well as various FIU undergrads, snowbirds, and other denizens of South Florida. Becker teaches creative writing at FIU, and her writing is peppered with anecdotes about her students’ efforts at poetry, irritated accounts of the occasional thinly veiled plagiarism (“Undergrads,” she writes, “I have read A Picture of Dorian Gray. You can’t swipe Oscar Wilde and expect me not to notice.”), and a truly baffling student event involving watermelons. Becker has a gift for anecdote, and can draw hilarity out of the most mundane encounter.

While the narrative frequently emulates the comic flavor of Bridget Jones’s Diary and similar epistolary works of women’s literature, Becker does not shy away from serious topics, from politics to family deaths to mental illness. “I have severe PTSD,” she writes, as a blunt aside to an anecdote about her shrink’s ongoing weirdness, “which I refuse to be ashamed of, because I did nothing to bring it on myself.” In the midst of a media storm surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, she writes of a poignant conversation with a young black neighbor in her building’s stairwell, one of those odd, random encounters with strangers that becomes a confessional. “I don’t have time for anyone who can’t acknowledge that every person on the planet belongs to the same human family, and all this fighting is just one enormous family feud,” she writes at one point, which seems to largely summarize her political positions on a multitude of topics.

The backwards narrative is an unusual and entertaining choice, particularly for a work of nonfiction (Becker is a poet by trade); it allows the reader to meet characters and get to know them almost entirely devoid of context, which is added later in dribs and drabs. The Winemaker, for example, is a largely absent figure of much dread until nearly halfway through the book, when we learn that he is actually The Chef’s older brother. Donald Trump the goose is introduced simply as ‘Donald Trump,’ and it may take a reader several baffled rereads before it becomes clear why Donald Trump is holding a campaign rally on the lake outside Becker’s apartment; it is only later that the origin of the nickname becomes clear. The final page - or the first page, depending on which way you read it - is an entry from Friday, January 3, 2014 at 7:34 in the morning. “LOVE is a leaky air mattress. #SunshineChronicles,” it reads, somewhat cryptically.

It’s a fun ride, and Becker is a marvelous, if madcap, tour guide through the history of her own life.

Jan Becker is currently an MFA candidate at Florida International University, and has taught courses there in composition, technical writing, creative writing and poetry. She graduated from Binghamton University in 2008.