memoir

The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick

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odd woman

In this 2015 memoir, Gornick gives us a flâneur’s tour of New York City and of her own quirky take on life. She calls it a memoir, but to my mind it falls somewhere in the grey area between memoir and personal essay.

Author of memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and one of the best texts on writing memoir, The Situation and the Story, Gornick warns us up front that she has not only changed names but reordered certain events and used some composite characters and scenes. I have no problem with pseudonyms, but shy away from reordering and composites. To me, these take away from the truthfulness of memoir, which after all is supposed to be nonfiction. Once I start thinking of characters, scenes and timelines as not real, then the power of nonfiction seeps away like air from a balloon.

That said, I assume her thoughts and reactions are real, so I enjoyed the opportunity to spend time in her company as she walks the city streets, usually accompanied by her gay male friend Leonard (real? not real?). She says:

What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

Having spent a large part of my life in cities, despite or perhaps in addition to enjoying more rural settings, I appreciate her immediately setting aside the image of New York as the grand opportunity for a young male genius to prove himself. Instead she says, “Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits—Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson.”

She speaks of Samuel Johnson’s distrust of village life with its closed and insular society. “The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.” Gornick calls herself an odd woman, one who finds herself on the margin of society. For her the city does more than heal loneliness; it gives her a chance to dream, to buy time to find her own way: eschewing acquisitions, turning away from the honey trap of romantic love. “I prize my hardened heart,” she says.

Her openness provides receptors where I can attach my own thoughts and experiences. When she speaks of Freud’s discovery that we are, throughout our lives, divided against ourselves and resistant to being cured, I’m reminded of the Jacqueline Rose essay I read a few weeks ago. When she mentions William James’s pronouncement that our inner lives are always in transition and that “our experience ‘lives in the transitions,’” I think of my classes where I encourage writers to explore the multiple emotions one character may experience moment to moment.

I enjoyed her literary games: Is your life Chekhovian or Shakespearian? Who would have written the story of this person: Edith Wharton or Henry James? I liked her references, such as when she discusses the relationship between Constance Woolson and Henry James, or when she speaks of an insight gained from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: “One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being.”

I’m cherry-picking parts I especially liked. In between, there are many wonderful scenes and witty, revealing conversations, such as this one where she runs into a former lover.

“You used me!” he cried.
“Not nearly well enough,” I said.
“What was all that about anyway?” he asked wearily.
. . .
“I can’t do men,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean,” he said.
“I’m not sure.”
“When will you be sure?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what do you do in the meantime?”
“Take notes.”

If you are looking for fascinating company in your own useful solitude, try spending some time with Vivian Gornick. This brief and captivating book will set you thinking and reminiscing.

What memoir have you read recently that felt like a meeting with a longtime friend?

In the Memory House, by Howard Mansfield

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memory

What we remember and how we remember it continue to puzzle me. Sometimes a random, quite trivial moment remains vivid decades later while critical events are somehow lost. And then, as a memoir writer, the accuracy of my memories matters to me.

Oliver Sacks said:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

I find this idea exciting and horrifying. My writing is sometimes like an archeological dig: unearthing memories followed by research to verify them as much as possible. Sometimes it is more like a circus clown’s act: pulling a handkerchief from my sleeve only to find it attached to another one, which when pulled out is attached to yet another, and so on.

But if every time I pull out a memory it is somehow changed, then I have to factor that in. Yet it is exhilarating to consider what those changes say about me and the person I’ve become, or rather, am becoming.

In this series of essays, Mansfield uses the recollections of individuals to compose a portrait of what we as a society remember, or more accurately, what we forget. From there, he considers the effects of that loss of cultural memory.

He visits small museums around New England, usually run by the local historical society, and ponders the objects donated to them: rock collections, strange antique tools, and in one a bottle of barley. Why would someone bottle up some grains of barley and present it to the historical society? Was it a particularly good harvest?

Mansfield says, “What is saved and what is discarded, who is remembered and why—all that is significant.” The who is important. In another essay he says, “In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors. We choose with monuments, markers and history books. We choose also with bulldozers, by what we remove.”

One essay describes the loss of Boston’s West End neighborhood in the late 1950s. In the name of urban renewal, the city assumed ownership of all the houses and demolished them to make way for luxury high-rises, giving the lie to their promises of mixed housing. Reimbursement, if it came, was minimal, leaving homeowners and landlords with mortgages they still had to pay. The layering of voices, remembering, summons a vision of what life must have been like before the wrecking balls came. Who decides what is destroyed?

Mansfield describes the tall trees that covered New England before the Europeans arrived. “Sailing to America, the early settlers could begin to smell pine trees 180 nautical miles from landfall.” In his brilliant book, Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessel described how the Native Americans had managed these forests to enhance hunting game and harvesting fruit and nuts. But the settlers feared the woods and cleared them for fields and, later, to send timber back to Europe. They also brought diseases that further decimated the woodlands. When trees were planted in towns in the 19th century, streets of elms and oaks and maples, another set of diseases came to wipe them out.

What enlivens these essays are the individual stories: the tale of the Cooke Elm in Keene, New Hampshire; Frederic Tudor who invented a machine to harvest ice from Walden Pond; the memories of West Enders like Joe Caruso, Richard Lourie, Barbara LoVuolo. Joseph LoPiccolo describes his grandfather, “known as the ‘mayor’ of Brighton Street” sitting outside with his cat Martha all day, greeting everyone who went by.

We have—each of us—in our lifetimes seen great changes in our culture. From our parents and grandparents, from the books we read and the songs we sing, we have memories of even older ways of life. Questioning the accuracy of those memories, which often seem transformed by nostalgia into a past that never was, may not be as important as asking why we want to remember the past that way, what our revisions say about our dreams and ideals.

What do you remember about the road you grew up on—perhaps what it looked like or an odd character who lived there or some game that you used to play?

All the Devils Are Here, by David Seabrook

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seabrook

This is a strange book. Seabrook creates a portrait of Kent, though not the popular “Garden of England” image and not the sort of portrait you’d expect. It is a form sometimes called a psycho-geography or an odd sort of travel memoir, where we are drawn into his mind, the odd things that interest him, the associations they carry with them. It’s like listening to a chatty passenger in the seat next to you whose inescapable monologue takes you to unexpected places, places you perhaps would never go, sometimes leaving you floundering as you try to figure out how he got from here to there.

Seabrook explores a number of coastal towns, down on their luck now that the boom for such seaside resorts has passed. Margate became England’s first bathing resort in the early eighteenth century with other fishing villages following suit. That time is over now, and Seabrook is drawn to the seamier side of what remains.

Margate is where Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” after World War I as he recuperated from a nervous breakdown. Seabrook says “Margate plays a deeper game” than putting up a blue plaque to mark the connection. He describes the poem as being unlike “a war poem in the accepted sense of the words,” instead “highlighting what was lost by describing what was left.”

This is a good description of the book as a whole. In Rochester and Chatham, Seabrook draws a tenuous link between the painter Richard Dadd who murdered his father and the last, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is of course our first association with Broadstairs but Seabrook also introduces us to a pre-World War II fascist network based at Naldera, the holiday home built for Lord Curzon whose daughter married Sir Oswald Mosley. “We still don’t know what’s buried there,” he says.

A later section find him in Deal, where he unearths anecdotes about disgraced English comedians, Robin Maugham (jealous nephew of William), the Stripper murders, and tales of several gay writers, actors and athletes.

I was drawn to the book because the summary on the back cover reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a fascinating book of a walking tour in Suffolk where places and people bring scraps of history, literature, art, and philosophy to the author’s mind. We learn little about the author himself except through his choice of material and meditations stimulated by them.

Both are first person monologues, both are journeys into a singular mind, one that is on the verge of a nervous breakdown—explicit in Sebald, implied in Seabrook. Both are assemblages of tesserae that resist forming a recognisable mosaic, pushing the reader to explore their own imagination and ability to find connections.

I found Sebald’s fragments far more interesting, but what is intriguing here is the way Seabrook’s bits and pieces lead you ever deeper into seedy and shocking stories. You’d think starting with a murder, the book could only go up, but you’d be wrong. We learn almost nothing about the author except his note early on that his fiancé has just died of cancer, yet we know him intimately from the juddering rhythms of his mind, the peculiar trail of associations that he follows. And still he surprises us.

Some people love this book; some hate it. If you are curious about the peculiar way one mind can work or about what goes on beyond the pretty postcards of Kentish oast houses, check out this book. But I warn you: abandon all preconceptions you who enter here.

Have you read a book that baffled you but you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn

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salt path

I was talking with some writers the other day about evoking emotion in our readers, and one asked if there could be too much emotion in a book. The incredible teacher/agent/writer Donald Maass, author of The Emotional Craft of Fiction, would say no; the problem is almost always that there isn’t enough.

Yet it’s true that sometimes I don’t have the emotional stamina for a particular book on that day. Sometimes what I need is something from what Dave King calls the gentle genre.

When I first heard of this memoir, I knew I had to read it. When Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose their beloved Welsh farm, the one they’ve devoted decades to restoring and working, where they brought up their now-grown children, they are devastated. The long court battle to prevent their former friend from seizing their farm, lost finally on a technicality, has emptied their savings. No home, no job, no savings. In their 50s, being self-employed they have no work references, and after the court case no credit. Then they learn that Moth has a terminal illness. He might eke out a couple of years of increasing disability.

Winn writes so movingly of leaving the farm, choosing what few keepsakes to hang onto, unable to lean on their children who are in school or starter jobs that I was overwhelmed. I’ve been there myself: empty-handed, with no choice but to turn to a frayed social safety net. Yet right now, with so many griefs and losses and fears in real life, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to go through this with her.

Yet I had to read it. Homeless, their temporary solution is to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path, which winds around Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset. They will have to sleep wild since they don’t have money for B&Bs or campgrounds, and they will have to subsist on minimal food bought with the £48 a week tax benefit that is their only income.

I walked part of this path with friends a couple of years ago and found it challenging enough, even with B&Bs and luggage transfer. So I had to know how they managed, what they encountered, how they were changed.

And they are changed. Winn doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties, yet finds space to describe the glories of the rocky headlands, the cliffs, the surging sea, the gulls and oystercatchers, the badgers and deer. The writing, like the path, is spare and occasionally glorious. She and Moth encounter quirky and often generous people on the path. And they find, as I did on a much smaller scale, that they are stronger—physically and emotionally—than they thought.

Their story moved me to tears. I cried at the beginning and at the end, for different reasons, filled with different emotions. Too much emotion? Not at all.

Have you read a memoir that taught you something about yourself?

Old New Worlds, by Judith Krummeck

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Old New Worlds

Subtitled A Tale of Two Immigrants, this book is both a memoir and an historical reimagining. In February of 1815 Sarah Barker, formerly a servant, and her new husband George, a missionary, set sail from Portsmouth, England bound for South Africa.

Whatever we may think of missionaries and colonialism today, it was an extraordinarily courageous thing to do. It is a brave thing to embark on a marriage—how much more so when it means leaving behind your country and culture; knowing that you will rarely, if ever, be able to return for a visit; unsure of what you will find when you arrive.

Two hundred years later, Sarah’s great-great granddaughter, writer and broadcaster Judith Krummeck, newly married, left South Africa for the United States. (Full disclosure: Krummeck and her husband are friends of mine.)

With a gentle but assured touch, Krummeck explores that transition, showing this country from an outsider’s point of view. She looks at the nuances of belonging, of creating a home in a new place. Unlike Sarah, her experience is complicated by the possibility of return, for visits or perhaps even permanently.

Much of the memoir portion also invites us into her process of learning about her great-great grandmother, not just burying herself in library reading rooms, but figuring out how to walk the tightrope between being true to the time period and the urge to impose today’s values on the actions of her imagined great-great grandparents. To her relief, the records show that George Barker did in fact treat his parishioners with respect and tried to protect them from the colonial administration.

The book is well-researched, drawing on Barker’s letters and journals as well as other sources. An extensive bibliography is provided. For all that, Sarah’s life, her thoughts and feelings are undocumented. Krummeck explains that Sarah is almost never mentioned in George’s writings, so she has had to use her imagination to fill in the gaps.

Of course it is no surprise that so little is known about Sarah. At that time, the lives of ordinary women were not considered worth documenting. Indeed, it is only recently that historians have begun concerning themselves with ordinary life, much less the lives of women.

For Sarah’s story alone I love this book, as I love any that fill in that empty space in the shape of a woman. Entwining it with Krummeck’s physical and emotional adjustment to America adds depth and resonance to the themes explored here.

As the pandemic spread and stayed, most of us have had to rethink our ideas of home. We look at our once adequate spaces with new eyes, trying to gauge where work can be done, children can be schooled, perhaps even an infected family member isolated. I remember how, as a child in a large family, I was constantly seeking out spaces to be private. Confined to the house, many people are experiencing that now.

So it is a good time to consider what it means to be at home: the place where we are born and the one we choose, the house we create and the family we construct, the country we call home and the landscapes we inhabit. This delightful book reminds us of what we inherit and what we make for ourselves.

What does home mean to you?

Green Card & Other Essays, by Áine Greaney

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green

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be home. Many people are working from home these days. All the years I worked in offices I desperately wanted to work from home. Even now I remember each and every snow day when I was allowed to work remotely as a sacred and blessed time.

I know there are many who struggle with this new reality, extraverts who miss the interaction with others. And it’s true that I valued being able to step down the hall and get Laura or Jonathan’s input on some task. Still, this being at home to me is nirvana, to be able every day to be in this space that I designed for myself.

But home is more than this house, this place we’ve carefully adapted to our needs. It is also the places where we suddenly and unexpectedly know we are where we belong. For me, that was the first time I crossed the Tappen Zee bridge into New England. And again that early morning landing in England, a March morning, frosty and cold. Faced with a standard transmission car with the gear shift on the opposite side and traffic patterns that challenged my orientation, still, for all that, I knew suddenly that I had come home. I was in the right place. Many return visits over the years have only confirmed that initial sense of belonging.

For Greaney, that’s not the point. These brief essays fold us into the experience of leaving one not-unloved-home for another, of trying to find your way in an alien culture where you don’t recognise most of the references and your accent is legitimate fodder for jokes.

Immigration is much in the news these days, but it’s important to notice, as Greaney points out, that there are plenty of immigrants who are welcomed without question. When someone who has been complaining about immigrants says to her “Oh, not you . . . We weren’t talking about you,” Greaney appropriately responds, “’English speaking? White?’”

Interactions like this show up the racism inherent in today’s discussions about immigration. A white friend of mine who emigrated from South Africa, likes to challenge people by saying, accurately enough, “I’m African-American.”

Greaney explores the lingering strangeness. Not just the bizarre experience of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the U.S., but also seeing what U.S. prom night is like versus a quiet 1970s mass after Leaving Cert exams, commuting among pumpkin and alfalfa fields, wondering if the New England Methodist church down the road might hold a way forward for a Catholic girl.

One of the most affecting essays in this collection calls on Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn where

. . . once Elilís Lacey (the daughter) steps aboard that ship, there are two separate and mutually invisible narratives—the tale of Eilís in Brooklyn and that of her widowed mother and stay-at-home sister back in Enniscorthy. Between those stories is an emotional firewall that blocks all knowledge of the other’s experience and, by extension each other’s respective wounds and losses.

Any of us who have left our first home for a new and different world can identify with this dual storyline, this firewall: a parent who cannot or will not imagine our new lives. Excitement and terror and sadness swirled together to forge determination.

These are beautiful essays: short, intense, emotionally precise, moving. I loved the essay about the gifts her father slips to her as she is leaving to return to the U.S. “’You’ll need this over yonder,’” her says, and Greaney pulls us around to see, yes, oh yes, they are needed.

What does the idea of “home” mean to you?

Best Books I read in 2019

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the twelve best books I read in 2019. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, by Stuart Hall
You might think that this collection of talks given at Harvard in 1994 by Stuart Hall couldn’t be relevant 25 years later, but nothing could be more germane to what is happening today. Hall, a prominent intellectual and one of the founding figures of cultural studies, examines the three words in his subtitle and how their meanings—how we understand them—have changed over time.

2. The Book of Emma Reyes, by Emma Reyes
Reyes, who died in 2003 at the age of 84, lived in Paris where she was known as an artist, friends with Sartre, Frido Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. She was also known as a fascinating storyteller, full of stories of her childhood in Colombia. The translator Daniel Alarcón says in his introduction, “Her vision is acute, detailed, remorseless, and true. There is no self-pity, only wonder, and that tone, so delicate and subtle, is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement.”

3. The Souls of Black Folks, by W.E.B. DuBois
DuBois presents a program of what is needed to bring the American Negro, particularly those in the South, into full citizenship: the right to vote, a good education—not just vocational training—and to be treated fairly. His prose is both expressive and straight-forward. These chapters are lessons in how to write about outrageous conditions with your outrage controlled and contained to add power to your sentences without turning the reader away. He marshals facts and numbers to back up his statements, yet doesn’t hesitate to move into lyric prose to bring home to us the reality of what he’s describing.

4. Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
I’d heard so many good things about Butler’s work, and especially this early (1979) stand-alone novel of hers, and I was not disappointed. Kindred is the story of Dana, a modern-day woman of color who is mysteriously transported back to a pre-Civil War slave plantation. Not only is Maryland’s Eastern Shore a far distance from her home in Los Angeles, in time as well as miles, but it is a shockingly unfamiliar culture.

5. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin
If you haven’t read this classic, stop right now and go read it. Came out in 1969? No problem: it couldn’t be more relevant to today. Don’t like science fiction? Won’t matter; there aren’t any space battles or robots; just beings you will recognise going about their lives. And any initial questions you might have about the culture you’re reading about are exactly the point.

6. A Place on Earth, by Wendell Berry
I had read some of Wendell Berry’s poems and essays, so I was not surprised that one of the big ideas explored in this his second novel is our relationship with the land. Reading this story set in the small town of Port William, Kentucky in 1944, we are immersed in a way of life unfamiliar to most of us today.

7. All for Nothing, by Walter Kempowski
To this last novel, published a year before his death in 2007, Kempowski brings all the experiences of his long life. Born in 1929 in Hamburg, he was caught up in WWII, at 15 witnessing the East Prussian refugees in Rostock, the coastal town where he grew up. Soon after, he learned that his father had been killed. Drawing on these experiences, Kempowski crafts a story of an East Prussian family continuing to live their normal, even banal, lives while the first Baltic refugees fleeing the approaching Russians begin to pass their estate.

8. The October Palace, by Jane Hirshfield
Hirshfield is one of my favorite poets, and I welcomed the opportunity to reread this early (1994) collection of hers. The poems in this book hold mysteries that, like koans, can leave me pondering a few lines for days.

9. Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser
A friend recommended this book so vehemently that she actually sent me a copy. I’d never read the Little House books, so I caught up on them as I read this biography. Wilder always maintained that her stories were true, but questions arose even as the books were taking the world of children’s literature by storm. Now Fraser’s meticulously sourced and immensely readable account shows what is fact and what is fiction in those books.

10. The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez
Nunez’s new novel, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, is a quiet and intelligent story of friendship, love and despair, tackling the questions most of us wrestle with at various times in our lives: Should I change my life? Is it worth going on as I have?

11. The Overstory, by Richard Powers
This popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel left me with a combination of enchantment and disappointment. It’s an ambitious work, one that is out to change the world, at least our human part of it. Powers conjures our life as a whole, the one that we share with the rest of nature, through nine characters, whose individual tales bounce off each other and sometimes intersect. While their goals may be art or love or survival, each character’s journey is also one of developing a relationship with nature, specifically trees. What I find most stunning is the brave attempt to write a larger story.

12. Memento Mori, by Charles Coe
Coe is a teacher and an award-winning poet. The poems in this book celebrate ordinary days, finding treasure hidden in plain sight. They are the poems of a man no longer young, one who has looked at his own mortality and chosen to live every day, every moment; a man who wishes he could go back and give advice to his teenaged self about what really matters.

What were the best books you read last year?

Never Stop Dancing, by John Robinette and Robert Jacoby

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Jacoby

An ordinary man at work on an ordinary day sits through the regular weekly meeting, gets a soda, talks with a co-worker. Then he hears someone say, “That’s John.” And sees a police officer looking at him.

On that clear and beautiful April day, John’s wife Amy was knocked down by a truck as she crossed a street and died.

His close friend Robert, a journalist and author of two books, wanted to help, but what can you do? What can you say?

What Robert did was suggest that he interview John several times over the course of the next year, John’s first year without Amy. Because their friendship included an openness and sharing considered unusual between men, Robert hoped the interviews would give John a safe space to talk about his feelings. He also thought that someday John’s two young children would want to know more about this first year without Amy, and that perhaps “John’s grief might inform others’ grief—how they manage it, how they talk about it, and how they process it—and, ultimately, how they move on.”

And Robert himself, not unacquainted with loss and grief, was curious:

I wanted to know how someone could experience such a loss, put words to it, and come back from it. I wanted to know his experience of losing someone so close, so beloved. At the heart of it, I wanted to know the breadth and depth of love, and love lost.

In this powerful, if sometimes wrenching, joint memoir we move between Robert and John’s voices. Emotions are laid bare; the small and large moments—cleaning out Amy’s closet, signing the children up for Little League—are exposed. Robert says, “It felt like we were opening up the brutal places of human existence and emotion, holding things up for discovery and examination.”

Both John and Robert are smart, articulate and curious. They wrestle with the questions most of us struggle with in our lives: Who am I? Why am I here? What happens to us after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? Does religion offer answers and comfort or just empty promises? Does grief ever fade? And if it does, have we betrayed our loved one?

It’s a remarkable book. John and Robert’s startling honesty and candor, holding nothing back, can’t help but open our hearts and ease our own empty places.

Most poignant are the scenes with John’s two young sons, four and seven, as they try to come to grips with their devastating loss. As John later says, he may someday find someone else to love and share his life with, but “My boys can never have another mother.”

Another devastating but comforting scene is when ten members of John’s church come to his home to sit with him shortly after Amy’s death. Curled on the floor, overwhelmed by grief, John feels them silently touching him, holding him. A laying on of hands. Held in that love and compassion he is able to find calm.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to step into the lives and hearts of these two men. Their story made me feel I’d opened the box and everything flew away except for one thing, and that one thing was love. By opening themselves to each other, John and Robert invite us into their community, to hold each other in love and compassion and to find peace.

Have you read a memoir that made you feel a part of something larger?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Heart Earth, by Ivan Doig

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doig

As children, we find it hard to imagine that our parents had lives before we were born. However, as we grow into the ages at which we knew them, it’s not uncommon for us to wonder what our parents’ lives were like, what they felt, what they dreamed. Perhaps we compare ourselves to them at the age we’ve now gained. Perhaps we use our own experiences and insights to illuminate what once seemed so mysterious.

Ivan Doig was hampered in doing this by his mother’s death from asthma when he was only six years old. His slim memories of her didn’t stretch very far. That changes when he inherits a collection of letters from his mother to her brother Wally while he was stationed in the Pacific during the last months of WWII. Doig was estranged from his uncle, something he regrets now that Wally is gone, so was unaware of the letters.

His mother’s words not only anchor his own memories, but give him a rare insight into her thoughts and feelings. This poignant and lyrical memoir, a prequel to his memoir This House of Sky, traces what he knows of Beneta Ringer Doig’s short life combined with his own recollections as they move from a ranch in Montana to a factory boomtown in Arizona and back again.

His evocation of the harsh reality of life in rural Montana combines love for the rugged beauty of the landscape with respect for the grit and determination of its people. The area is only just beginning to recover from the Great Depression, not yet sharing the wartime economy. They move to Arizona hoping the desert air will help Beneta’s asthma and the work improve their financial outlook.

I love the way Doig combines the larger picture of what is happening in the country with his own family’s experiences. His memories of playing war in the dusty factory town and drawing pictures of airplanes and Uncle Wally’s ship remind me of my own childhood a decade later. As writers we sometimes forget to include the social context of our stories, the political and cultural trends that help form our characters. This memoir is a good model for how to do that well.

I love, too, his description of his parents’ relationship, filtered as it is through his child’s eyes, family stories, and now his mother’s own words. They move back to Montana, hoping a higher altitude will help her asthma, and dreaming grand dreams of finally succeeding at making the land pay off. Their struggle reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilders’s family fifty years earlier each year looking ahead to finally getting a good wheat harvest to pay off their debts.

Part of why I enjoyed this audio book so much is that it is narrated by Tom Stechschulte, one of my favorite narrators, not only because of his laconic yet engaging voice, but also because his accent reminds me of my friend Frank. I relaxed into the rhythm of his speech, barely noticing the sometimes overwritten passages that might have bothered me if I’d been reading the book.

I think I’d still have enjoyed this portrait of family life in a particular time and place. I would also have loved the portrait of Beneta, a lively, determined and passionate woman whose steadfast spirit seems to capture all that is best in our image of the American West.

What memoir have you read that vividly captures a time period through the lives of ordinary people?

True North, by Jill Ker Conway

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True North

This sequel to The Road from Coorain begins in September of 1960, as Conway travels from Australia to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she will be a graduate student. She says:

The future of a woman alone in the world and the 1950s was a blank page, because no one I knew had lived that way, and the rules of the culture were clear that they shouldn’t. So I experienced my leave-taking as a farewell to the known, a jump off the edge of the world into an unknowable future.

From the weather to the customs—such as dinner being served at 5:30 pm, the time for nursery tea back home—she has to find her bearings in this new world. I love her descriptions of Cambridge, such as:

It was old, by any standard, and sparer, in a fashion I could not quite comprehend, than any urban landscape I’d yet seen.

and

I’d never thought there could be beauty in a pallet of gray and white, but suddenly I could see in the low slanting light, the bare branches, and the gleaming snow of an early winter afternoon images I’d seen before in a Rembrandt drawing but never properly understood.

She is buoyed up by the “easy good manners and cordiality” of the people she meets. She quickly finds herself in a group of like-minded women, most of them a year ahead of her. Best of all are the courses she plunges into for this next phase of her scholarly career. She adeptly describes the excitement of the ideas in her seminars and the individuals teaching them.

As a teaching fellow in her second year, she finds herself working for John Conway, a war veteran from Canada. Although she comes to their first meeting “prepared to be very businesslike,” they quickly veer into discussing their “shared experience of a first encounter with the United States.”

Reader, she marries him. Then he gets an irresistible offer to be on the faculty and a master at one of the colleges at York University in Toronto. They agree to take turns: ten years for his career, ten for hers, and they move to Canada. It is a good move for her as well. She becomes involved in college administration and, at the end of this book, is invited to become president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

I loved her descriptions of Toronto as well, where she has to adjust to a longer winter. Her insights into the Canadian view of the U.S. also intrigued me.

Unfortunately, she encounters some of the same prejudices she’d left behind in Australia. In fact, this last aspect became one of my greatest rewards in rereading this book. As she details her strategy for getting equal pay for herself; then all women faculty at the university, and then the other women working there—secretaries, lab technicians, cleaning women, career counselors—I remembered all those hard-fought battles, the ones we seem to be having to fight all over again.

She also talks about her work as a historian, writing about women’s roles, how they changed, and how the women themselves perceived their roles. Fascinating.

I’m eager to move on to A Woman’s Education, Conway’s third memoir, this one about her time at Smith College and one I’ve not read before. These books not only bring to life specific times and places, they chronicle the inspiring life of one woman on the cusp of major changes in our culture. Even better, they encourage the reader to consider and reconsider ideas and, perhaps, memories that speak to the issues we are struggling with today.

Have you read a memoir or biography that seems extraordinarily relevant today?