It’s been odd lately how I keep finding memoirs at Value Village that I’d considered asking for at Xmas last year. I am glad I hesitated too, as they’re not all that good.

Just finished reading Barbara Walters’ Audition. I can’t really recommend it. Or I can, but not particularly for its writing. I can say it was interesting to learn about the early days of television and the world of television journalism. There’s no doubt that Walters is a pioneer for women in television, and apart from that, an excellent journalist who’s had a fascinating career.  I also enjoyed learning more about The View, the TV show that Walters developed and stars in.  And of course it was titillating to learn more about the rich, famous and influential.

I just don’t think this book will “stick” with me for very long. For that, the writing has to sing. This one hums.

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A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamil: If I were teaching this month, I’d be holding up this memoir to the class and saying This is what it’s all about- look no further for the kind and grace and beauty every memoirist strives for.  The book is wonderfully detailed, evocative and searingly honest. I’ve also never read such a sophisticated examination of the addict’s life. He really looks at the drinking life of his generation and scrutinizes alcohol’s gifts and curses, and how a hard drinker is made, not born.  The making is day by day, event by event; it does not happen overnight. It’s like the whole apple of addiction’s course, not just a slice. Fascinating. And did I mention the writing is a dream?

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…which according to Vanity Fair magazine, “…will thrill minimalists and inspire maximalists.”

Maximalists…is that truly a word?

Anyway, this book, which is edited by another magazine, Smith Magazine, looks like good fun. A friend gave it to me some time ago and on this dark and dreary June afternoon, I am going to start it. This may give a whole new meaning to the editor’s maxim: “When in doubt, cut it (the copy) out.”

It could also be good fun to ask participants in a memoir writing class to try and sum up their lives in six words!!

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Today I am including an interesting email from my brother, Dr. Geoffrey Simmins, an architectural historian and associate dean at the University of Calgary, Alberta. Have a listen to the audio files he includes as well.

“…but you would have to have a heart of stone to read Paul Quarrington’s memoir, Cigar Box Banjo, and not be moved by his self-deprecating honesty responding to the news that he has terminal cancer. It’s a great memoir, Marjorie, at least by what I have read of them, and might be a new(ish?) genre–the mortality memoir? I liked it better than his fiction, e.g., King Leary. (Didn’t read anything else by him though, e.g., Whale Music: maybe I should.) Certainly it has a poetic perfection to it all–Roddy Doyle writes the preface, and friends write the epilogue because, well, Paul dies in the writing of it. But not before he writes a damn fine memoir, and also a couple of great songs. Rage, rage against the…etc., or at least pour another glass of whiskey. I am going to try and send you the audio file with the song. “

“Hope you can access this file; if not, try this site–which is the same version: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/28/are-you-ready/

And maybe even if so, have a look at the slower version of the co-authors–Dan Hill (yup, that Dan Hill) and Martin Worthy–a bit slow for my taste:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6saLRZi13g

And here is Paul singing jazz and talking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh55O6GuEk

Here’s a tribute to him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP52Pkkji5M

and…if you still have the energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzNHUFzqG4Y&NR=1

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Memoirs – expect the unexpected, that’s for sure. A recent “memoir” critiqued in The Globe and Mail is An Exclusive Love, which is a memoir about suicide – someone else’s.  Two someone elses. Author Johanna Adorjan writes about the dual suicides of her grandparents; the grandfather in failing health and wishing to exit his life, the grandmother unwilling to live without him.  The critique praises Adorjan’s book and calls it, fittingly, a “memorial” to the grandparents. The overall description of the book sounds fascinating. I would read it in a wink.

Another recent review in The Globe and Mail, done by columnist Leah McLaren, discusses “widow lit,” which while it is a term I hadn’t heard before, it’s certainly a genre I’ve been assiduously avoiding (just cannot even open The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion). I am married to an older man – quite a bit older than me. I don’t want to even think about any of this.  Anyway, it’s poor old Joyce Carol Oates who wrote a recent “widow lit” memoir, when she unexpectedly lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond J. Smith.  Says MacLaren: “A Widow’s Story is more than an individual tale of woe. It’s also a seminal text in an emerging literary genre. First there was chick lit, then came mummy lit. Now we have widow lit – a wave of books unleashed by the experience of losing a loved one.”

Gentle readers, you go right ahead and enjoy yourselves with this genre. I’ll pass. But I did want to note its emergence and perhaps its looming pervasiveness.

One last memoir from recent G & M gleanings: Inside Wikileaks, by Daniel Somscheit-Berg. Well of course, you could see something like this coming. Make money as you can, from someone famous, now fallen on hard times. “Disillusioned insider’s take on the rise and fall of Wikileaks is much like reading a 21st-century version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm,” writes reviewer Colin Freeze.  “Both books feature a rag-tag handful of insurgents, whose teamwork garners them initial success. And both portray a charismatic autocrat as the group’s leader, a figurehead who publicly denounces tyranny, even as he privately imposes it.”

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like” -  President Lincoln once said.

Yes, exactly.

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No, it’s not a memoir. Now and again I just have to read a bit of fiction. Rockbound won the “Canada Reads” contest in 2005, bolstering its long-standing reputation as a Canadian classic (in this case, of Nova Scotia’s South Shore). Donna Morrissey, one of Canada’s finest novelists, was a fervent promoter of Rockbound.

Now that I’ve read it, I understand why.

When novels get picked apart, section by section, theme by plot by style, as they always do, they never make a perfect reading experience. So I could tell you there were aspects to Rockbound that bothered me (the tidy and forced romantic ending, for example). Overall, I am just glad to have read the book, which did what I require novels to do, and that is fly me away to other times and places and permit me to live there a while. I loved the South Shore dialogue (some might refute its accuracy, I don’t know), sustained throughout. I loved the insider’s view of a hardworking people (to put it mildly) and how they shaped their lives with this work on and by the ocean. It is not a kind life nor are they kind people. But I did enjoy their connectedness to the natural world and their strange, confrontational dependency on each other.Their world is a long, long way from microwaves, Facebook and the World Wide Web. Hell, it’s a long way from electricity and the Sears catalogue!!!

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Home, A Memoir of My Early Years, by Julie Andrews. Yes, this memoir is written by *the* Julie Andrews, the chanteuse extraordinaire in Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, etc.

It’s a nice book. And no, I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise. I just mean that the book is as nice as we always hoped Julie Andrews truly was, in real life. What is startling is the very difficult childhood Andrews came through – and came through well, which many may not have.  Alcoholic parents, poverty and neglect, hard work from a very young age, half-siblings to care for from the new marriages of both parents, being the primary bread-winner for her mother’s family from adolescence on – Andrews relates all this frankly and calmly. You can tell from her detailing of many difficult events that she was a sensitive child and adult. But there isn’t a hint of self-pity or recrimination anywhere. Life was what it was and most of all, she is grateful for the opportunities that came to her life, and the abundance of love in it. It’s a very British tale in some ways. No whingeing Pom here though, only the stiff-upper-lip sort!

Her professional-life stories are great. I didn’t know she was a stage actor as much (more actually) as a movie star. Her stories about acting with Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Canadian Robert Goulet, etc., are a book highlight – brutally honest, but affectionate  and amusing too.

I enjoyed it very much. I also enjoyed the writing, which is crisp and clear.

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Good morning, memoir readers. Today we have a guest column from author and journalist Silver Donald Cameron, who just finished reading a Xmas-time book gift, Sh*t My Father Says, by Justin Halpern. He says it is a memoir “of sorts,” and of course it is a hit TV show right now, too, starring ever-energetic William Shatner. So here is the book review.

“I want to go back to being a young father, and try the whole fucking thing again. I was way too fucking polite.”

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I loved this book! I was actually concerned that with a title like The Hearts of Horses, it might be a western romance of some sort. I found it at Value Village, where I find so many good books. In this case I was willing to take a chance that it might disappoint, because good or bad, I just felt like reading fiction that focused on horses. What was it all about, I wondered.

A true cowgirl and her experiences as a horse “gentler” (as opposed to breaker) in frontier Oregon, WW I era. The writing is excellent, the character memorable, the story fascinating and the history real. I couldn’t put the book down!

Author Molly Gloss has published three other books (novels). You can bet I will be reading them too! No, this isn’t a memoir. But I really need to intersperse fiction now and again as I read memoirs. Reminds me of so many important factors, such as pacing, drama, “character” development, and always, always, placing good writing front and centre of any book.

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