Three recommended memoir book titles, from the Literary Review of Canada: The Year of Finding Memory, by Judy Fong Bates, Random House; Alice Street, by Richard Valeriote, NcGill-Queen’s University Press; and The Geography of Arrival, by George Sipos, Gaspereau Press. These three memoirs chronicle immigrant life outside the big city, writes reviewer Joseph Kertes.

So many wonderful memoirs to read….

According to the NY Times, Blair’s memoir  – despite its rough reception in Ireland – is doing very well indeed. Details: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/world/europe/09blair.html?_r=1

A friend gave me a copy of an article from The New York Review of Books. The article is titled “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography” and is written by journalist Janet Malcolm. Herein I quote one paragraph that was just too good not to share:

“Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself [bolding mine]. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.”

I just finished reading A London Child of the 1870s, by Molly Hughes, which my friend KJ from Vancouver was kind enough to give me.  In the gift card that accompanied the book K wrote: “I really enjoyed this memoir – found it fascinating on a number of levels. Wanted you to have it for your collection.”

Lucky me! This is a gem of a book. It is the first in a trilogy, too, so I have reading pleasures in my future, should I choose to return to this unexpectedly warm Victorian world.

Warm, yes, but complex as well. Hughes’ memoir could easily have been written as a dirge for her lost family members, but this was not how she chose to remember her childhood. The work is mostly  a matter of imagination over reality – and a triumph of the former.  In brief, read the book. It is beautifully written and gives such a rich picture of the times.

Two points I wanted to mention:

One: In the preface, writer Adam Gopnik says: “There is also, I think, in the relative neglect of Molly’s writing, and its significance, a just detectable prejudice against urban memoir as opposed to pastoral one. At least, it seems to me that say, Lark Rise to Candleford keeps a higher reputation than Molly’s memoir because it takes place in the country. One of the things that makes Molly so moving is the intensity of her recreation of Victorian London, on terms that Chesterton would have embraced and italicized, as a place of adventure, folly, and romance.”

Note to self: discuss differences between urban and pastoral memoirs; these categories are new to me. Also: read Lark Rise to Candleford! What a delicious title – and so very British!

Two: I absolutely loved Gopnik’s concluding paragraph and would like to use it for an epigraph in my thesis:  “It is, I suppose, possible to see something unreal, or Quixotic, in Molly’s choosing to avoid all and every truth. But no realism can encompass all that is real [boldings mine]. Death and pain are enough pain to season any sunny memoir. If there is something evasive about her celebration, there is, in its minute detailing of a life gone already by the time she wrote it, something beautiful and permanent, too – happiness not merely recorded, but wrought, from a time and circumstances more iron and resistant than she is prepared to allow. Realism, like Parnassus, has many mansions, and a mantelpiece is as real as a marriage bed. The heroism of children, seeking happiness in the midst of their parents’ anxieties, is a kind of heroism, too. Molly’s book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise, that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.” Adam Gopnik, New York, 1987/2005 copyright: the author and The New Yorker

George Elliot Clarke, Nova-Scotian born author, poet and academic, who now teaches literature at the University of Toronto, wrote about graphic novels (narratives) in his March 21st column in The NovaScotian (The Sunday Herald). He describes these narratives as “…illustrations that are themselves stories, plus plot-and-character-developing words that spell out what the pictures alone cannot….”  I’ve only seen a few of these graphic novels, and that was recently, too. Didn’t know they existed before January of this year! I love the idea of them – while mostly  seem to be impervious to their popular charms.

That said, I am interested in the book that Clarke mentions, Maus (1986), by Art Spiegelman, “a Pulitzer-prize winning memoir of the author’s parents’ survival of Nazi Europe….” Clarke says this memoir “is often considered the first serious graphic narrative.” But in fact, he continues, “there was an earlier work: Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip…a bizarre concoction…[and] Essentially a rewrite of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice…[where] we see Orfi – a rock star – descend into the subterranean hell of Milan, in search of Eura, his beloved. They meet but just as the myth insists, they also part.” Etcetera! Not so sure about this one, but the Speigelmen memoir, definitely.

Augusten Burroughs, some critics like to say, “goes where other memoirists fear to tread.”

I am not sure if this is exactly true – but god knows he is a brave writer. I just finished reading Running with Scissors, which I made myself read from a psychological distance – because otherwise, I might have vomited, and any number of times.

From Buroughs’ website: “Augusten’s second book [Running with Scissors] was a memoir. It was also a publishing phenomenon that helped to ignite a kind of memoir fever in America and abroad. Running with Scissors was released in 2001 to virtually unanimous critical acclaim. The memoir would ultimately remain on the New York Times bestseller list for over four consecutive years, eight months of which were spent in the #1 position….”

This is wonderful achievement. And if even half of what Burroughs writes is true (I believe it is: it had “the ring”), I say god bless him and long may his success last. But beyond this, I find it hard to write about him in a sustained manner. As directed, I’ve read the book and today, all I really want to do is push that experience and all its yucky lingering feelings away from me, as far as possible.  I agree that his sense of humour is original and keen. I also think his memoir(s) is a culmination of the “horror memoirs” that might have begun with Christina Crawford’s memoir, Mummy Dearest. (Not really sure when these “tell-alls” by adult children of famous parents began; must check.)  I think Burroughs is a fine writer and he needed these memoirs of his the way we all need air. And water, shelter and love. How some people survive and then defy their childhoods, remains a mystery to me….

So again, this latest reading venture is over and done with, and perhaps I can discuss the book more critically and in depth, another time.

One last interesting note: Burroughs counts among his dear friends the author Haven Kimmel, who wrote A Girl Named Zippy. Now that memoir I enjoyed, for all that it was odd and occasionally gut-dicing. I wonder how Kimmel and Burroughs came to be friends?