Harwich Resident’s Memoir A Cautionary Tale Of Attraction And Addiction

A riveting new memoir, “Shelter of the Monument: A Provincetown Love Story” (Black Rose Writing, 2023), by Yvonne deSousa of Harwich confronts the age-old question: Why are “good girls” so attracted to “bad boys?”

When the story opens Yvonne is a 17-year-old National Honor Society senior at Provincetown High. Richard is 28. He grew up in Provincetown but has been living off-Cape for several years. He married and is now divorced. His love of “partying” seems to have broken up his marriage. While Yvonne accepts that Richard likes to “party,” she doesn’t yet know anything about addiction, or that an addict could be as appealing as Richard.

For deSousa, this was a story that “demanded to be told. The words and memories just flowed out of me,” she said in an email interview. “They brought many, many tears but even more smiles and I just wanted to share Richard’s story and the way he helped me find my voice. He is such a wonderful memory for me that it was far more healing than sad to write all of this.”

So what is the attraction? Of course, Richard is “gorgeous.” He has “dark brown hair and brown eyes [that] perfectly matched his medium complexion.” He has “strong arms that I imagined could wrap you up and hold you forever.” They meet through Yvonne’s older sister’s boyfriend. Soon Yvonne’s asking Richard for a favor — to buy liquor for her party because she’s underage. He agrees. Later, while she’s finishing a paper on Eugene O’Neill and his connection to Provincetown, Richard calls and asks her for a date. He cooks her dinner. They drink wine. In the bedroom, she walks on his back, which he says he has pulled.

Her mother disapproves of the relationship. They break up. Yvonne turns 18 and graduates from high school. She goes off to college. And on her first weekend home, she sees Richard again. And then again on Columbus Day weekend when she learns that he and his on-again/off-again girlfriend Patty, with whom he does cocaine, are expecting a child.

DeSousa graduated from Provincetown High School in 1987. She began her college career at Emerson College but transferred to UMass Boston her junior year, graduating with a degree in English. Later, she worked as a victim witness advocate for the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. Her first book was “MS Madness! A ‘Giggle More, Cry Less’ Story of Multiple Sclerosis.”

The fascinating setting for this memoir is largely off-season Provincetown in the late 1980s — a very different place from today. Provincetown High graduated its final class in 2011. Fewer children grow up in the town these days, basically curtailing generations of “townies.” And after she graduates from college in 1991, Yvonne returns to her hometown and again gets involved with Richard.

When Yvonne and Richard get back together he has lost his job in construction, and the truck that goes with it, so now he walks everywhere in Provincetown. Will they stay together, or not? The memoir reads almost like a novel — such is the suspense deSousa creates. While one cheers for the love affair, it is rife with such problems that the reader wants to tell Yvonne to “run!” By the time the couple has been together for six weeks, Richard is smoking cocaine from a “make-shift pipe made from plastic soda bottles.”

“January could be pretty bleak for townies,” deSousa writes. But Yvonne doesn’t mind. She’s living with Richard “and appreciating every minute of it.” While he hunts for odd jobs, she looks for full-time work and collects unemployment checks. At times, life seems good. Except for the drugs. Richard admits he has a problem, and he has schemes to put a stop to it. They sound plausible to Yvonne who, after all, “had no idea how anyone got off drugs.” But of course, Richard’s plan of weaning off coke doesn't work. Richard becomes involved with a drug dealer, and at one point seems to have stolen money from him. Finally, Yvonne has an epiphany: “The realization broke like a gut-wrenching strike, so debilitating… This was my Richard. And this was how he would always be… the addiction would always come first.” Broken hearted, she leaves him. And rather than spoiling the suspense, let’s just say that Richard’s life trajectory does not improve.

“What I would like readers to take away from the book is that people are more than their addictions and that there is help available,” deSousa says. “I think that with the rise of opioid addiction that the world faces now, we know these things better today. But in Provincetown in the ‘90s… we were isolated.” She says that she and her peers believed that people “could stop their addiction if they really wanted to.”

She also notes that “Richard changed my life for the better.”

It took deSousa about eight months to write her memoir, and then about six years to rewrite it — work she accomplished partly in the Snow Library in Orleans. She notes that she wanted the book’s title to refer to a “common theme” linking the story. For her, it was her hometown, Provincetown. And “what better represents Provincetown than the Pilgrim Monument?”

“Shelter of the Monument” is available at the Provincetown Bookshop, 229 Commercial St., and through online sellers.