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I've been trawling through a part of my own history this weekend—through file folders stuffed with xeroxed passages, quotes, and lecture notes, with old book reviews and essays, with pitched-forward questions. I wanted to see, as I prepare to teach at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, just what I'd once been thinking. I wanted to measure my progress since then.
The exercise is bittersweet. It involves recalling books that I could not live without—but have, for a decade or more. It evokes wonder at my own wonder. It settles me into a slower unit of time. It reminds me of the power that books still have over me.
I was a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun, years ago, when Michael Pakenham was at the helm. In the big pile of things that I've been sorting through this weekend, I found a Sun piece I'd written on memoir. Tucked within were thoughts on memoirs. I share a few of passages from that essay with you, my book-loving blogger friends. I cherished these books then; I cherish them now:
I might not have learned to love the memoir form—or begin to write it—had I not happened upon Natalie Kusz’s miraculous Road Song in 1990. The story of the author’s long recovery from a ferocious attack of a pack of Alaskan dogs, Road Song was, for me, the revelation of a form. Here was the past delivered with equanimity and respect. Here was a terrible tragedy gentled by words, a book in which the good is everpresent with the bad. Kusz writes to comprehend, and not to condemn. She writes her way back to herself, and as she does, she broadens the reader’s perspective, disassembles bitterness, heals. Road Song begins in the spirit of adventure, not with despair. Road Song begins with an “our” and not an “I” and reverberates out, like a hymn. There is no selling out here. Just a hand reaching out across the page.
It is the same with The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, a book by first-time author Kathleen Finneran. With The Tender Land, Finneran is asking vast, impossible questions about love and loss. She is restoring a long-lost brother to the page, a boy named Sean, who kills himself at the age of fifteen for reasons no one can fathom. Why did Sean swallow his father’s heart medicine? Who was responsible for his sadness? What should Finneran herself have known to protect this brother from his fate? These are personal questions, certainly, very particular details, one family, one love, one loss. But as Finneran tells her story, she urges her readers deep into themselves, asks them to consider those whom they too love, and whether or not they have loved fully enough. Finneran’s fine prose operates as a prayer—not just for both her brother, but for her readership.
Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert is another exquisite example of the memoir form—a book of escape and discovery, exhaustion and surrender and relief. Morrow’s book takes readers out far beyond where most have ever been—to the sands of Egypt, to the company of exotic beasts and plants—and somehow yields up passages that speak directly to the experience of humankind.
“I thought of memory as a blanket,” Morrow writes of her traveling days. “I could take a thing out of my mind and handle it as though it were part of some beautiful fabric I carried with me, things that had happened long ago, the faces of people I loved, the words of a poem I had long since forgotten I knew. This was something any nomad or illiterate peasant knew: the intangible treasure of memory, or memorized words.” Morrow’s readers don’t have to go to Egypt to make this discovery. Morrow has made it for them, and has loved it with words, for their sake.
2 Comments on Perfect Memoirs, last added: 8/17/2009
The fabulous Holly Cupala of Brimstone Soup tagged me on this meme, and since I was musing just yesterday about bookshelves and friendships, it seems an appropriate Sunday launch. The question is, What's on your bookshelf?, and the specifics are these:
Tell me about the book that has been on your shelf the longest...
A beaten, brown thesaurus (the pages unbound now and out of order) and the bible my mother gave me. In fact, however, most all of my books have been acquired during the last 20 years. I was not a bookish kid (I was a writerly one, not a bookish one, which is truly not the right order of things) and did not come from a bookish family, which is not to say that I did not come from an educated one. It's simply that the home that I grew up in was not furnitured with books.
Tell me about a book that reminds you of something specific in your life ...
Natalie Kusz's Road Song was the first memoir I ever bought—the first I ever read. I was pregnant with my son. I was in a Princeton bookstore. The book was revelatory (you can write about your life? like this?) and I wrote to Ms. Kusz, never expecting a response. A few weeks later, one came. "As I am sure you know (because, judging from the elegance and insightfulness of your letter, you must be a writer yourself), writers are in the business of attempting to expose the human condition in such a way that our description resonates in the souls of other humans ... " A writer myself? Not then. Just someone who loved the sound of words, their puzzling together. By announcing to me a new genre—memoir—and by suggesting to me a possibility—an actual writer—Ms. Kusz and Road Song changed my life.
Tell me about a book you acquired in some interesting way ...
This past Friday six books arrived in a brown box, chosen by an editor with whom I've lately had the privilege of corresponding. I had mentioned that I sought, in my life, books that "put faith in the reader." She responded with generosity and with a telling eye and ear. Every one of these six books appears to be my kind of book. You'll be hearing about them here, over time.
Tell me about the most recent addition to your shelves...
Since the books in that box aren't yet on my shelves (but on the coffee table, where I will leave them until they are read), the newest books were three: Book of Clouds,The Frozen Thames, and The Cradle. I've written of them all here. Book of Clouds also, in its way, changed my life, my way of seeing what is possible in story.
Tell me about a book that has been with you to the most places...
Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I've read it several times, in several places—in El Salvador while visiting my husband's family, in Orlando while helping to oversee a corporate launch conference, on the train to New York City.
Tell me about a bonus book that doesn't fit any of the above questions...
Two books that I felt strongly should win the Pulitzer Prize did, and they sit eloquently on my shelves: March by Geraldine Brooks and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. There were shouts of joy here when both were announced. Both winners aren't just enormously talented writers. They are gracious people, which counts just as much.
8 Comments on The Books on my Shelves, last added: 4/28/2009
What a wonderful meme. I so enjoyed hearing about the books and your relationship with them. I've just finished The Frozen Thames because of your review, and I'm going to put other books on my list from this meme. Thank you.
Thanks for doing this fun meme. I especially like your Road Song story. I'm so glad the author wrote you back and said what she said. Just from the two that I've read, I know that your memoirs accomplish that description which "resonates in the souls of other humans."
I was 28 and pregnant when I happened upon Natalie Kusz’s Road Song in the Princeton University Bookstore. It was the sort of story that I, then an avid reader of traditional history and biography, had not read before—a life story that read like a novel that left me wanting to know so much more. I’d been writing poems up to that point in my life. I hadn’t done much in the way of publishing. I’d studied the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania and never taken a single writing workshop. Road Song left me wrecked by something urgent. I wanted to write like Kusz had written—honestly, poetically, of a life. I wanted to discover, in the personal, universal truths.
I didn’t see myself writing a book, of course. I thought of transitioning from the poem to the essay. I bought anthologies, read widely, taught myself about this genre. I thought about what had not been done quite yet.
The first piece I produced was perhaps 1,000 words and had a lost necklace at its center. When I thought about publishing it, I went straight back to Kusz, to the front matter in her book, where she acknowledged magazines that had accepted her excerpts. One of those magazines was called Iowa Woman, and I began at once to hunt it down. Finding i at last, I sent my essay that way. And then I waited, as writers will, for months.
This was back in the old day of mailboxes and stamps. I checked my own eagerly each day. Finally, indeed, an Iowa Woman letter showed up. It was long. It encouraged. It also critiqued. It was the first literary critique I’d ever received. It asked that I reconsider some passages and asked, too, if I’d consider submitting again.
I reconsidered, and I considered. “The Pearl Necklace” was my first published essay.....
— from my keynote talk yesterday to the inspired and inspiring crowd at the Philadephia Stories' Push to Publish conference. Thank you, Christine and Carla, for the opportunity.
5 Comments on Pushing to Publish, last added: 10/22/2008
Anna, do you have any in's with my postman? I used to know mine well but then he was made redundant, and I miss him terribly. He always brought the good news.
Good ones are hard to come by. Mine is a gossipy, suspicious magpie who brings nothing but thick envelopes from the IRS and Victoria's Secret catalogs (both of which make me want to bury my head in a box of Krispy Kremes).
I do love a good memoir. The quote from The Names of Things is just stunning. Another book to add to my long wish list.
You're teaching at a university! What will you teach?