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Author Tours

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When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me in a different way.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If you read a book set in a place you know well, you have a different relationship with the story. When I read an Anne Tyler book or one by Laura Lippman, I recognise the places in and near Baltimore that they mention, and the story becomes that much more real.

A few years ago when I was in Edinburgh, I went on an Ian Rankin tour. His books are true works of literary art, and I highly recommend them. I first found one in a Toronto bookstore; they weren’t available in the U.S. and the online bookstore thing hadn’t taken hold yet. He immediately became one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed watching his immense talent increase with every book, especially those featuring detective John Rebus.

The tour was fun, taking us to places that cropped up in his books as well as to buildings where he and fellow Edinburgh authors lived. I also made an effort to look on my own for things referenced in his books, such as the miniature coffins found on Arthur’s seat and Rebus’s favorite bar.

Recently I enjoyed a tour in Quebec City that took us to places mentioned in Louise Penny’s Bury the Dead. Seeing where the incidents in the story took place, following Inspector Gamache’s footsteps, enjoying the restaurants and bistros mentioned made the story real in an entirely different way. If nothing else, I saw how short a distance it was in some cases from one place to another, making it easier to understand how Gamache could move so quickly between them.

Our tour guide Marie had some inside information: Penny herself had stayed in the house where Gamache stayed with his friend Emil in the story. Marie had seen inside and verified that it matched the description, just as we could verify the descriptions of other, more public places mentioned.

Marie speculated that Penny had eaten in these restaurants, ridden the funicular, visited the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. I thought: Of course she did! That’s how you research a book. All good writers do that.

When you travel, I encourage you to read novels set there and, if possible, take a tour of the places mentioned. Let me know how that changes your perception of the book.

Have you ever taken a tour of places mentioned in an author’s book? If you read a book set in a place you know well, how is the experience different?

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

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When Tookie is sent to federal prison for moving a dead body—it was to help a friend and Tookie didn’t know what else she was moving—a teacher sends her a dictionary. The study of words saves her sanity. Sentence, for example, is not just an independent thought or expression. It is not just a mathematical equation or logical statement. It is both a judgment and a punishment. She says that “the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention.”

When she is unexpectedly released after ten years, she goes to work at an independent bookstore in Minneapolis specialising in indigenous history, fiction, memoir and poetry, a stand-in for Erdrich’s own Birchbark Books. Native American herself, Tookie is fascinated to learn about her own culture and loves finding just the right book for a hard-to-please customer.

Less enjoyable are the wanna-bes, the White people who wish for or actually claim native American heritage, such as the domineering Flora who comes in every day bearing unwanted gifts until she unexpectedly dies, holding a book. From then on, her uneasy spirit haunts the bookstore, at first seen only by Tookie and later by the others who work there.

I would have been happy to live in this book for five times as long as it took to read it. I love Tookie’s voice as narrator: low-key, expecting the worst, appreciating what isn’t, aware of her own faults. I love her courage and her passion. She adores her now-husband Pollux despite the fact that he was the tribal policeman who arrested her, and has a testy relationship with his daughter Metta who turns up with a baby.

Then comes 2020. Up to that point, the impact of the larger society has already been felt. In addition to the wanna-bes and the issues independent bookstores face, Tookie says, “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” and knows how lucky she is to have found a job after prison.

We are so engrossed in her ordinary and extraordinary life, that her reaction to the pandemic, the shutdown, George Floyd’s murder and the protests in her city mirror our own, making the unexpected familiar.

I love the easy mix of social classes in this story and the friendships that develop. I love the understated humor and the way current events are folded into the story. I love the fluid boundaries between past and present, reason and spirituality, those we hold dear and those who haunt us.

Most of all I love the books: title after title bandied about as Tookie tries to find the right book for a discerning customer or one-up a co-worker. I’m poring over the list provided for free by the publisher, checking off the ones I’ve read, highlighting the ones I want to read.

Tookie’s is a different world from the one James MacBride conjures in Deacon King Kong, but it is equally vibrant and so real I felt I knew these people. What a wonderful book!

What’s your favorite Louise Erdrich book?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

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Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentucky, as well as to imagined and remembered places. She talks to strangers, meeting real and imagined people. She keeps vigil at the bedside of a beloved friend in a coma and visits another near the end of his life.

But more than her physical journeys, it’s what happens when she brings her particular mindset to grapple with the small irritations of life like the flood in her apartment, the larger problems in the country careering toward a showdown between democracy and what we then thought was populism in the November election, and most of all the death of friends and lovers, as well as the sense of her own time on earth running out as she approaches her 70th birthday.

It is art that holds her steady, whether studying the Ghent altarpiece or discussing Roberto Bolano’s work or a classic film. In one of my favorite parts she visits Fernando Pessoa’s house in Lisbon, and examines his personal library. He was a fascinating poet who wrote under his own name and 75 others, which he called heteronyms, creating full lives for each alternate personality.

In my classes on story structure, I’ve begun including a section on experimental structures. I tend to prefer more linear stories when I’m reading, but Jane Alison‘s book Meander, Spiral, Explode has helped me better appreciate other patterns and also to recognise them in stories that I’ve loved.

This memoir is definitely a meander, perhaps one of the hardest structures because it still has to hold together even as it wanders in a seemingly random fashion. Smith makes the challenge even greater by moving in and out of dreams and memory. As in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the margins are fluid. Smith moves deftly between the humorous, banal, or wrenching moments that make up her year, finds signs and portents in unexpected places, and stumbles upon strange happenings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. Her distinctive voice—the audible one—carried me even deeper into the experience than I believe her authorly voice alone would have. I mostly listened to it as I was falling asleep. Thus, with the membrane between sleep and waking so permeable, the surreal turns and dream logic seemed fitting.

I’d like to read it again and study more closely how she made it all work.

What book have you read recently that you immediately wanted to reread?

“The Practice,” by Barbara O’Neal

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This blog of mine grew out of a reading journal I had been keeping at the recommendation of the marvelous writer and teacher Jewell Parker Rhodes in her craft book Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors. Its lessons on writing craft are honed by exercises and illustrated by story examples and analyses, making it a treasure for all authors.

In the reading journal I jotted down three things that I, as a writer, learned from reading each book. I found the exercise so useful that when I started this blog, I decided to review books with a slant toward what writing lessons I took away from it. Thus the blog would be useful to writers because of that slant, and to readers who, as I often hear in book clubs or discussions, can’t always identify why they particularly like or dislike a book or some aspect of it. A little understanding of the elements of creative writing can help both writers and readers deepen their appreciation of the stories they engage with.

Just as I consumed Jewell’s book, I continue to learn more about my craft. I read a lot, obviously. I take workshops, read craft books, listen to podcasts, and follow useful websites. One of the best websites for writers is WriterUnboxed.com. With a large group of contributors, the daily posts are a goldmine of craft lessons, inspiration, and supportive ideas.

This post by Barbara O’Neal so moved me that I now reread it as part of my prewriting routine at least weekly. The opening quote from Annie Dillard hit me where it hurts: “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” How often have I procrastinated, knowing that any deadlines are of my own making?

I urge you to read the full post here. I’ll just say that the author acknowledges all her excellent reasons for skipping that day’s writing whether it is garden chores calling or a potential lunch date with a friend. As she says, “something always gets in the way of writing.”

Yet writing, she says, is a practice like meditation or journaling. The only way to do it is to just do it. Let each day’s work add to yesterday’s. In the gentlest way possible, she reminds us that “practice” is not just a noun; it is also a verb. No matter how much I want to be able to play the Courante from Handel’s Piano Suite in E minor, I’ll never be able to unless I actually work on it. And keep working on it. I’ll never finish this novel unless I keep working on it.

I don’t want to get to the end of my days and find that I have procrastinated them away. It’s fine to take a day of rest now and then. It’s necessary to take a walk and water the garden. Yet I cannot forget my practice. And I’m grateful to Barbara O’Neal for this reminder. Read it for yourself.

What is your practice?

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

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I read this first novel by the author of the Gilead series a long time ago. Or rather, I sank into it, stunned by its richness. Sisters Ruth and Lucille are being brought up by their grandmother on the outskirts of Fingerbone, a small town uncomfortably situated on a lake somewhere in the northwest part of the U.S. “It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.”

Whether it is flooding the town or receding into its secrets, the lake is a powerful force. The girls’ grandfather died when his train ran off the bridge over the lake, and their mother, after dropping them at their grandmother’s, drove off a cliff into the same lake.

After their grandmother, who retained a few social ties with the town, dies, Aunt Sylvie takes over caring for the girls. However, her idea of providing for them is to hoard empty cans and newspapers, to buy them sparkly pink slippers instead of school clothes. Sylvie prefers the windows open and the lights off, regardless of the season or clock.

With Ruthie as our guide, we experience the wonders and costs of eccentricity. The girls must carry their losses and construct a way to order their lives. They must decide whether to take refuge in the ordinary world or remain open to the revelations that it masks.

On this second reading, I was again entranced by the voice of the novel. Slightly old-fashioned, deliberate, unsentimental, it not only adds substance to the strangeness of this household, but also moves fluidly between actual description and metaphysical exploration. Details—unexpected, alive, perfect—make it work. For example Ruth describes the scenes her grandfather painted on the bed, chest and wardrobe he made, and then says:

Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

This time I was better able to appreciate the extraordinary choreography of the book. In only the second paragraph we are told:

The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return.

Margins such as these—fluid, unstable, unreliable—are explored throughout the book. The sounds in the night may be ghosts or crickets. Perhaps what has disappeared may be distilled by remembering, desolation healed by creating small strongholds. Perhaps even the most final margin would yield to someone like Sylvie who “felt the life of perished things.”

There are a few other images that also recur in the story, accruing meaning, adjusting our perception of the characters and their choices. This is an element of creative writing that I particularly enjoy, and Robinson handles it beautifully.

What really makes this unusual story work, for me anyway, is the absence of censure. The townspeople may judge Sylvie, the mother, the girls, but the author does not. There are only choices, neither good nor bad, just choices.

I look forward to reading this book again in a few years. Who knows what I will find?

Have you reread a favorite novel and found it even richer than you remembered?

A Fortnight in September, by R. C. Sherriff

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Touted as an escape from the pandemic, this 1931 novel follows a lower-middle-class London family as they go on their annual vacation to the seaside holiday spot Bognor Regis.

Mr. Stevens carefully updates his Marching Orders, the list of what each person needs to do to prepare for the trip, not out of an autocratic need to control but from a genuine desire to have things go well for everyone. Mrs. Stevens hides her terror of the sea because her family always has such a good time. Dick at 17 and Mary at 20 good-humoredly go along with their father—no teenage rebellion here. Only young Ernie kicks up a ruckus, wanting to bring his toy yacht even though it is inappropriate for the sea.

They always stay at the same place, the Seaview, even though the place and its landlady are not aging well. But the Stevens family are loyal to the good old Seaview. This gentle narrative lets us enjoy the peculiar pleasure of stepping out of ordinary life into a brief vacation, one that is so much the same every year that it has become a ritual.

While the pace rarely quickens beyond a brief flutter, such as the one over whether to rent a slightly more expensive beach hut, one of the interesting threads in this story is about time. Of course, there is the cliché about time racing when you’re doing something fun and standing still when you’re not, and the changes time is bringing to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. However, there are also more interesting insights, such as this one:

They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday: the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left, vaguely wondering, … [w]hether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey.

There’s also the way Mr. Stevens makes little special occasions and traditions for his family “to strengthen the links of a home.” And the way this annual vacation becomes a time outside of time for the family, though haunted by its finite nature.

The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently. All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect. Dreams based upon such delicate fabric must be nursed with reverence and held away from the crude light of tomorrow week.

I was alone in my book club and seemingly alone as well among the avalanche of positive reviews at being dismayed by the portrayal of this family. They seemed unrealistically superficial to me. For example, they do everything together and are unfailingly sweet to each other. There’s no interpersonal tension; they are a whole family of Beths from Little Women.

Of course, they do fit in with the saccharine characters in popular stories of the time, something I tried to remind myself. And the story is clearly meant to be a diversion, a beach read rather than a literary experiment. No point expecting the complexity of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves published the same year.

But what I kept coming back to is the class issue. In the extract from the author’s autobiography appended to the book, Sherriff says while on holiday at Bognor he enjoyed watching people and trying to imagine their lives. Eventually, he decided to choose one at random and “build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea.”

And the people he imagined are simple people, so simple as to seem fairly brainless. They are content with their tiny, tightly constrained lives, with rarely a thought beyond—on rare occasions—career advancement or lack thereof (Mr. Stevens), having a little time to herself at night (Mrs. Stevens), cricket (Dick and Ernie), or possible romance (Mary).

Mr. Stevens buys a Times for the train because he likes “the feeling of culture it gave out” and enjoys a few little articles that make him wonder about things that he might “find out about . . . one day, when he had the time.” Mr. Stevens goes for a long walk every year to think things through. This year Dick goes on one too. So we are treated to an extended look at their stunted and unimaginative thought processes.

Yes, it’s a restful and sweet novel with many little nuggets that gave me a jolt of recognition, thinking Oh, yes, that’s exactly how it is. I just wish the author could have looked past the snobbish stereotype that the lower classes are just simple people living simple lives and perfectly happy that way. In his famous play and film Journey’s End about WWI, Sherriff gives Mason the cook much more depth, enough to equal the officers, though that may be the brilliance of Toby Jones’s performance rather than the written lines.

In this book, there is no hint of that war, except perhaps in Mr. Stevens refusal to look more deeply into the news. However, here another interesting thread is about change. The vacation is an annual ritual, carefully reenacted, yet there is the parents’ concern that Dick and Mary might be getting too old for it and want to do something else or perhaps stay somewhere else. We do see both young adults starting, however tentatively, to think of life beyond the family.

Then there are the changes to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. Most of all, as one member of my book club pointed out, there’s the fact in only eight years a power-hungry autocrat will start another war, one that will devastate England and change their lives forever.

What is your favorite beach read this summer?

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

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Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed.

With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood, the move to Atlanta, and the terrible path to her mother’s murder when Trethewey was only 19. The girl’s response was to bury all memory of the years in Atlanta, the good and the bad. The woman’s self-appointed task is to unearth them and find again her lost mother.

And she does. With just a few deft strokes she summons her mother to life. I felt immediately that I knew this young woman, now divorced, leaving Mississippi for a new life with her young daughter. I felt the bond between mother and daughter, all the stronger for their separation from the close family and community back in Mississippi.

One way the author effects this revival is to include her mother’s own words, searched for and now recovered. Also, she gives us the context of the time: the early 1980s when the bitter segregation of her childhood is giving way finally to new opportunities for people of color and for women in particular, the excitement, the whiff of freedom in the air.

There’s no melodrama or sensationalism in this account. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language.

Trethewey weaves into her story the effects of being a child of a mixed marriage—her father White and her mother Black—and of growing up amid the racism of the South. She looks at how these experiences and the lasting trauma of her mother’s death have influenced her own growth as a writer.

In doing so, she has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past. My friend Susan Mills’s debut novel On the Wings of a Hummingbird also explores this theme: how do we an individuals, as a community recover from or at least deal with terrible suffering? So I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially now when it seems nearly impossible to wrest reconciliation from sorrow.

In Atlanta, Trethewey and her mother lived on Memorial Drive. You can’t make these things up. This book is more than a memorial to her mother, more than a memoir, more than a masterclass in writing. It is a searing look at the lasting effects of racism and domestic abuse. And it is an invitation to think about our own losses and how they have shaped us.

Have you read a memoir that made you reflect on your own life?

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’s father, the two women discovered that he had left them nothing but debts. By the time of the story, they have decided that their only recourse is to take in lodgers, dressing up the idea by calling them paying guests.

Enter Lillian and Leonard Barber. Members of the “clerk class,” they take up residence in the newly created apartment on the second floor and quickly change the atmosphere of the house, with their lively music and visits from Lillian’s rambunctious, working class family. Still the Wray women are more puzzled than distressed. What upsets the applecart is Frances’s growing attraction to Lillian.

The author brilliantly captures the peculiar intimacy of families sharing a wall, something I’m familiar with from living in rowhouses, triple-deckers, and a duplex (aka semi-detached). You try not to listen, but nonetheless find yourself having an unwelcome familiarity with their routines. Sometimes you even speculate about what’s going on over there.

Vividly captured as well is the domestic life of the period. The author gives us enough of Frances’s routine to understand what a burden housework was before the “labor-saving” devices we are accustomed to, without letting those passages become boring. She does this by exquisite detail, carefully chosen, and sometimes by making them part of action scenes.

I was surprised and impressed by the author’s handling of the class differences between the three families. Though never coming out and saying something like They are not our sort, Mrs. Wray remains aloof from the Barbers and Lillian’s family. However, Frances begins to enter the lives of both and seems to be free of that sort of class consciousness.

In fact, the psychological portrayal of Frances is what helped me stick with this overlong book. A fascinating character to start with, Frances changes with exposure to new information or outlooks, each transformation believable within the story.

The other thing that kept me going was the narrator Juliet Stevenson, one of my favorite actors. Having her voice in my ear is always a pleasure.

Who are your favorite audiobook narrators?

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce

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I enjoyed Miss Benson’s Beetle so much that I went back to look at this, Joyce’s first novel. The recently retired Harold has too much time on his hands. His wife Maureen keeps their home in a small village in southern England immaculate, seemingly angry at Harold though it is not clear why. For Harold “Days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair.”

Then a letter arrives, addressed to him in a shaky scrawl. It is from a former colleague Queenie Hennessy. They had been assigned to work together and had become friends, although they’d had no contact since she had moved away many years ago. She is now in hospice and writing to say goodbye.

Harold struggles to find the right words, but eventually writes a short note to her and sets off down the lane to post it. But he keeps walking, and walking, and eventually realises that he is going to deliver it by hand, walking the 500 miles north to Queenie’s hospice. After talking with a “girl in a garage” who teaches him how to microwave a burger and relates her story of keeping her aunt alive through faith, Harold sends Queenie a note telling her to wait for him.

Even the most analytical person can succumb to magical thinking. Harold comes to believe that he is walking to save Queenie. He is ridiculously unprepared, with no supplies or appropriate clothing, wearing yachting shoes which quickly wear out and give him terrible blisters.

What makes the story work is Joyce’s tone. She doesn’t make fun of Harold or look down on him. She presents each incident as it comes, leaving the reader to decide how we feel about Harold, and about Maureen, who finds that she misses Harold once he has gone. I fretted about Harold’s unworldliness, spending down his retirement as he journeys, not knowing how to care for his feet properly. Yet it is his innocence that draws people to him, almost all displaying the kindness and generosity that coexist with the hatefulness we see in the media.

This isn’t a fairytale. Pain is a constant. Not just the physical pain of walking day after day, but the emotional pain of reliving past mistakes, which is where Harold’s mind goes as he walks: his bleak marriage, the promising son who no longer visits, the self-loathing reinforced not only by their rebuffs but also the early rejection by his parents. And both he and Maureen have some kind of unfinished business with Queenie.

The aspect of novel-writing that I struggle with most is deciding when to reveal information. An author wants to create suspense by withholding information but revealing enough as they go along to reward the reader, as well as dropping clues along the way. Even in non-mysteries, most readers want to puzzle out what’s going on before being told.

Here, I felt the pacing of reveals was off. I don’t want to go into detail for fear of giving away too much. I just felt that the backstage machinery was too obvious in places. It’s good to have this model to set against other books where I found the pacing of reveals to be more organic and more satisfying.

I appreciated the changes Harold goes through during his walk, from his introspective moments to his painful losses of direction. I especially liked his experiences of England’s countryside, villages and towns on foot. I often walk in England for a week or ten days at a time, and have found it a vastly different experience than with any other form of transportation.

There were parts of the book I didn’t find as interesting and was tempted to skip, but I’m glad I took it slowly and persisted to the end. I’m also intrigued by the idea of a modern-day pilgrimage. Quite a few of my friends have been walking the Camino de Santiago. I’m more interested in smaller pilgrimages, at least for now.

If you were to go on a pilgrimage, where would you go and why?

What Comes Next and How to Like It? by Abigail Thomas

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There are many ways to write a memoir. You can make it a mostly chronological narrative of a particular time in your life—a small, self-contained period—as I did in my memoir Innocent. Still working chronologically, you can hopscotch through the years following a particular object or relationship, as J. R. Moehringer did in The Tender Bar. You can concentrate on a particular incident and explore how it ripples through the rest of your life, as Marguerite Duras did in The Lover.

You can abandon chronology and narrative altogether and piece together small bits of memoir, as Marion Winik did in The Book of the Dead or Denise Levertov in Tesserae. This may seem easier to the novice memoirist since you only need to write little bits at a time. The difficulty comes in stitching them together. Whether you want them to create a pattern or simply be a crazy quilt, the pieces have to work together. They have to be set against each other such that they make smooth reading. It’s actually far more difficult than a traditional narrative.

This is the task Thomas has set herself here. She says, “I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it’s so boring.” These pieces, which range in length from a sentence to a page or two, do cohere into a satisfying whole, in part because of her consistent voice, but even more because they circle around a single theme: Timor mortis conturbat me—fear of death disturbs me—comes from the Catholic Office of the Dead. She explores what can sustain us in the face of our inevitable end.

This body of mine, the one in pink pajamas, the one hanging on to her pillow for dear life, these pleasant accommodations in which I have made my home for seventy years, it’s going to die. It will die, and the rest of me, homeless, will disappear into thin air.

Thomas tells us about her simple, everyday life, stitching together her love of painting on glass, being with her children and grandchildren, napping with her dogs, meeting up with old friends, and so on. One of the main threads in the pattern is her longstanding—over 30 years—platonic friendship with Chuck. These are the things that sustain us.

Unfortunately, this piecemeal format doesn’t allow us stay with any issue or situation long enough to care deeply about the characters. Another obstacle is that these people are leading privileged lives, although Thomas is open about her challenges: three marriages, life as a single mother, her husband’s brain injury and subsequent death, her daughter’s breast cancer, her own struggle with alcohol and nicotine.

For a memoir to move a reader, the author must make themselves vulnerable, which she does. At times, though, I felt she was sharing too much about her flaws; some pieces made my sympathy for her fade.

Then comes beautifully written insight such as the piece “Out of the Blue” where her daughter tells her of a disturbing memory. Thomas ends with “This is the kind of memory I have always thought needs to be remembered by someone else after the original owner is gone.”

Then a few pieces later, she talks about her childhood visits to her grandmother’s house and how the scent of privet flowers—one of my particular favorites—filled those days; the path to the beach was lined with privet bushes. She says to Catherine, “The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me.” Catherine responds, “Yes, Mom. I know. Your memories are my memories now.”

I love this idea. Thomas asks Chuck what happens when we die. He responds, “You live on only insofar as others continue to think about you. Then you fade and blink out.” As friends, as parents, as writers, we seed our memories and stories for others to carry forward.

What memoir have you read that has stayed with you?