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In her memoir (Hiroshima in the Morning) and personal essay (“Why I Left My Children“), author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto explained why she left her husband and two sons (ages three and five at the time) to become a part-time parent.

The video embedded above features a Today Show clip with Rizzuto and relationship expert Argie Allen. A recent profile of the author on Shine generated more than 16,000 comments, 360 re-tweets on Twitter, and 75,000 “likes” on Facebook.

What do you think? Here’s an excerpt from the article: “In any case, it’s evident that there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to motherhood. But does striking out on your own or being a ‘Hiroshima Mom’ take free-range parenting to an extreme?”

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I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges.  In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's The Possessed and Ander Monson's Vanishing Point.  I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.

A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko.  I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.

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Dignity is a word I have long associated with Darin Strauss.  His refined mind and sensibilities were on display in novels like Chang and Eng.  A certain quietude pervaded interviews.  When I learned that Strauss was sending a memoir into the world, a memoir entrusted to McSweeney's (and hence, in some fashion, to the multiply talented and deeply generous Dave Eggers), I knew for certain what I'd be reading next.

I read Half a Life this morning, grateful for every white-steeped page.  It is, as you must have heard by now, the story of an accidental death—the story of what happened one day when Strauss set out to play some "putt putt" with his high school friends.  He was 18, behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile.  On the margin of the road, two cyclists pedaled forward.  Of a sudden, there was a zag, a knock, an "hysterical windshield." A cyclist, a girl from Strauss's school, lay dying on the road. She'd crossed two lanes of highway to reach Strauss's car.  He braked, incapable of forestalling consequences.

It was forever.  It was always.  A girl had died.  A boy had lived.  Strauss spent his college years, his twenties, his early thirties incapable of reconciling himself to the facts, of entrusting them to friends.  There's much he can't remember perfectly.  There are gaps, white space, breakage—all of which, in this McSweeney's production, is rendered with utmost decency—the thoughts broken into small segments, big breaths (blank pages) taken in between.  There is knowing here, not shouting.  There is an exploration of guilt, and no bravado. 

Half a Life sits now, on my shelf, beside Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home—two memoirs that transcend precisely because they are so quiet, so well considered, so honorable. These books, along with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning, give me hope that memoir, the form, is finding its center again.  There may not be any sure-fired truths, but there are consequences.  There may be stories, but they are always tangled.  There may be ache, but there is solace, too.  There may be drama, but in drama's wake, we stand.  In need of understanding.  In need of one another.

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Early in the Rutgers-Camden workshop we reflected on the auguring power of literary lists—what they can tell us about a story not-yet-unfolded, what they teach us about voice.  We used, as our exemplars, the opening pages of Colum McCann's Dancer, the extraordinary yield in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and the evocative early pages of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning.  We heard:




All three lists featured here sit toward or at the very start of books—before we know plot or meaning, before w

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Yesterday I sat outside beneath a canopy, reading Hiroshima in the Morning, a memoir by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto due out from The Feminist Press this coming September.  It is her story, of course—about a journey she takes alone to Japan, about the things that she learns, about the world that opens and the world that shatters in the midst of self-discovery.  It is a story in which everything is on the line, and in which bargains must be struck with time.  What is a mother?  What is a wife?  What is owed, and what must be taken?  Whose side do we stand on when the question is survival?  These are the themes that shape and permeate Hiroshima in the Morning, and this is what makes the book true and brilliant memoir, and not mere autobiography.

(There is a difference, and it matters.)

Reiko, these words for you:

If remembering lies at the heart of all memoir, the best memoir goes far deeper—asking questions about the propulsive nature of time, the consequences of forgetting, and the treacherous liberations of solitude.  Hiroshima in the Morning is a memoir of the most sophisticated kind—a lyric, a quest, a universal poem.

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Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and I are friends. We met, as I've noted here before, over the essays we wrote about mothering—our work ultimately appearing in Salon.com and in the two wildly successful anthologies that Kate edited with Camille Peri, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. We continue to meet, from time to time, in San Francisco, in New York City, or here outside Philadelphia. When we can't meet, we email and call. We read the other's books long before most people do. We rely on one another.

This year, both Kate and Reiko have new books due out; they have both also launched new blogs. Kate's Cake Walk, a recipe-infused memoir about surviving childhood, is due out from Dial Press in May. The book, so irresistibly Kate, is excerpted here.

Reiko's memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is due out from Feminist Press in September. It's a book about motherhood and Ground Zero, a book infused with freighted questions about what it means to survive and to love. Reiko is a mother, a teacher, a reader, and, of course, a writer, and in her new blog, you get to see all sides of her.

The photos above, finally, are this: Kate's cats, looking out through her kitchen window, while she made dinner for us this past August; and my husband, my son, Reiko's family, and Reiko during our trip to Hawk Mountain, a few years ago.

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Yesterday Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a good and wise friend, wrote to say that Hiroshima in the Morning: A Memory, will be published by the Feminist Press in September 2010 in the big book fall of their 40th anniversary year.

Hiroshima is Reiko's book, a book about being a daughter, a mother, and a wife during an almost year of travel. In 2001, Reiko, a New Yorker who had grown up in Hawaii, spent eight months in Japan interviewing the survivors of atomic bombings. She was away from her husband and children during the 911 attacks. That year away, she has written, on her web site, "fueled a new way of thinking about memory and truth and narrative," and Hiroshima is the book that has emerged from all that thinking. I've had the pleasure of reading this book throughout its incantation and making, and I am overjoyed for her that the Feminist Press will release it into the world.

Congratulations, dear Reiko.

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