A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!
A First-Time Book by a Writer You’ll Remember
“Unflinching” by Swannie Hoehn is a memoir that never flinches
By Ed Goldman
I wrote the book because I want someone to know I was here, that I existed.” The speaker is Swannie Hoehn. The book is “Unflinching: True Lies and Fierce Dreams.” And rarely has a memoir’s title served as such an accurate summary of the book or the life that inspired it.
Eloquently written and privately published, this is the first-ever book by a longtime acquaintance of mine whose upbringing and much of her adult life could have provoked a great deal of flinching. But Hoehn, who’s both salty and peppery at 81, learned resilience early. And when she enrolled in a memoir-writing course at Sierra College—”mainly out of curiosity and something to do with my time,” she says—she began to realize, homework assignment by homework assignment, that she’d lived a life she wanted to share, in book form.
Swannie Hoehn. Photo courtesy the author.
With painterly imagery that never turns florid, “Unflinching” unreels like a film saga—which isn’t surprising since Hoehn says she’s been “obsessed with movies” since youth. “When I was a teenager and lived not too far a drive from Hollywood, I’d sneak into film premieres or just be one of those people gawking from the sidelines as the stars arrived in their limos,” she says. “I loved movies. They provided an escape from my life.”
First, a bit of back story, as they say in script conferences (“character arc” is also a favored term in these settings in case you’re compiling clichés). Hoehn’s and my paths have intersected periodically as adults but as I was reading her book it became clear that we should have met years ago. As a child, she moved to the suburban Southern California city of Lakewood—as did I, a few years later. Of the several colleges she attended but never graduated from, at least two were my own alma maters (Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach). She hung out in Pan American Park as a kid and teenager, as did I, and fell in love early with art and poetry (as did—well, you get the idea). Some of her works in each discipline appear in the book.
How we reconnected is another brief aside. In 2022, she had lost her partner of many years, Carson Wiley, a prolific, witty and decidedly self-absorbed fundraiser for the arts and non-profits. Wiley had succumbed to both breast cancer and a form of dementia. She had been in a nursing facility for her final decade. Prior to that she and Hoehn had a lopsided, years-long partnership in which the well-named Wiley took advantage of Hoehn’s industriousness and patience (Hoehn worked in management positions for a restaurant franchiser). I’m not speaking out of turn here. Everyone who knew them knew the dynamic of the situation. Wiley, whom I liked nonetheless, was tall, elegant, flighty and verbal; Hoehn was small, pragmatic and taciturn. And the one you really wanted to talk to.
After Wiley passed, Hoehn decided to take a class that focused on grieving, taught by a mutual friend, Elke von Schlosser. Hoehn gave von Schlosser a copy of her book. Von Schlosser raved about it to me during a chat and asked me if I’d ever heard of Hoehn. It’s when she referred to the author as Swannie—a derivative of Patricia Ann Elizabeth Swanstrom, her given name—that I almost leapt with enthusiasm (“almost” because I was sitting at the time).
Connections were made. Hoehn mailed me her book. I read the first few paragraphs of it and suddenly a few hours had galloped by. It was and is that absorbing.
“I haven’t seen or heard from my father since I was three years old,” Hoehn begins an early chapter of the book. “My mother met him when he worked as a cashier at the Boulevard Theater on Washington Boulevard in L.A. He was the manager. In June of 1943, during World War II, he enlisted in the Navy. I was 3-1/2 months old. My only memory of my father is watching him walk away from our home and family a few years later. He never looked back, even though I was sobbing. In the one picture I have of him, he looks cocky and sure of himself, Mom has a tentative smile on her face. I look puzzled.
“My mom filed for divorce soon after that picture was taken of Mom, Dad in his Navy uniform, and me.
“I’m told I resemble Mom.”
Later in the book, in a chapter appropriately titled “Shadow People,” Hoehn talks movingly about when she came to terms with her sexuality. “I thought coming out was the hard part,” she writes, “Turns out it’s not an event, just the beginning of a process.” She describes the uncertainty with the confidence of a lifelong writer: “I peeked out of every new door, looked around, took a few steps, then moved forward, I was cautious and protected myself. I came late to this new life. I was born too early to be a hippie, too late to be Betty Crocker.”
Hoehn still lives and works in a two-bedroom/one-bath 1934 home in East Sacramento she bought decades ago. It’s from that base of operations she’ll send you her book when you contact her directly, at Irishswan7@yahoo.com. Once you read it, you’ll know she’s very much been here.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).