nonfiction

The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser

by

9780385547079-1084277655

I was first alerted to Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” by the Longreads list of best essays in 2019 which sent me to the Paris Review where it was published. I thought it brilliant.

So I looked forward to reading this book. Hauser calls it “a work of personal nonfiction,” saying “These essays reflect my life as I remember it and the stories I’ve made of that life to understand how to keep living in it.”

In “The Crane Wife” Hauser goes to Texas to study the whooping crane shortly after calling off her engagement. Sections alternate between her engagement and her experience with the cranes. Equally important are those who study the cranes, the motley collection of volunteers who welcome her to this Earthwatch event.

She gives a poignant recounting of her deteriorating relationship, constantly setting aside her own needs as shameful. Men are entitled to have needs, but “when a woman needs, she is needy.” At the same time she is measuring the small things that fill the needs of these whooping cranes who are on the verge of extinction.

The Crane Wife is a story from Japanese folklore about a crane who fell in love with a human man. She didn’t want him to know she was a crane, so every night she plucked out all of her feathers. “Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work.”

I found the book’s cover image disconcerting: a person, presumably a woman though not obviously, whose turtleneck is pulled up to erase her face, leaving her vulnerable stomach bare. I suppose it’s meant to refer to the title essay and Hauser’s erasure of herself, but it doesn’t reflect the collection and ultimately felt demeaning.

What makes these essays so good is the way she balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes a story’s characters, sometimes both. I especially enjoyed her bookish roamings through Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s oeuvre. I also liked her travails in deciding what to say when asked to officiate at her friends’ wedding, wanting to capture the breadth and depth of the women’s relationship, while also discussing her obsession with The X Files and what she calls its MSR: Mulder-Scully Relationship.

Another reason these essays are so absorbing is her use of specific details, like shopping for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and incisive incidents like a bit about Christmas stockings. Mostly, though, it is her openness that makes these essays hit home, her willingness to be vulnerable.

Many of them have to do with her love life, which I would have found more interesting thirty years ago. Still, I enjoyed them and even listened to the entire collection twice. It is read by the author, whose voice has a bubble of laughter under it, even during the sad parts, keeping me a little off balance, which is not a bad thing.

Near the end of the book she returns to the idea of the stories we tell ourselves about the events of our lives, stepping back from the story to comment on her authorial choices. This is a smart book and gave me a lot to think about.

What essay or essays would you put on your best-of-this-year list?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

by

smith

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

by

Screen Shot 2022-07-25 at 12.14.40 PM

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?

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

by

Memorial Drive

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?

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, by Jacqueline Winspear

by

Winspear

I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging memoir from the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Some of the themes and settings will be familiar to readers of those novels. Here, Winspear deftly adds family stories to her own memories of growing up in a working-class family in post-war England.

It is the war, both wars, that color their lives. Her grandfather’s shellshock from the Great War makes him hard to live with, panicking at the sound of a dropped pan. Her father, who could never bear loud noises, was assigned to an explosives team during WWII, while her mother as a child was evacuated during the Blitz. Jacqueline grew up listening to her mother’s stories “of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing.”

Most fascinating for me are Jacqueline’s parents, colorful characters whose zest for life keeps them moving around, cash-poor but rich in love for family and the English countryside. Their mutual yearning for adventure prompts them to live with Romany travelers in between years-long forays out of London for life in rural Kent. The title comes from one of her endlessly optimistic father’s sayings.

As farmworkers, they are lucky to be given shacks to live in, which they make furniture for and fix up as best they can. Young Jacqueline joins them in picking hops and fruit when she is not exploring the fields and copses, often with her younger brother. The lessons of loving that she learns as a child from her hard-working parents—their patience with the shellshocked grandfather, their forgiveness of each other after the rare rows, their careful tending of the land—bear fruit in her own affectionate portrayal of them and their world in this book.

We learn about what inspired her to become a writer, a scene I recognised as similar to my own. And we learn a lot about her writing process as we perceive how she has made use of scenes from her life in her novels. She also shares the process of sorting through her memories, confirming some with research and finding others to be inaccurate.

This memoir doesn’t romanticise the sometimes harsh conditions and doesn’t shy away from the illnesses, accidents and other misfortunes that plague the family. Still, this is a charming read, even if you are not familiar with the novels. I was at times reminded of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, though that is from an earlier period, just after WWI and is more about village life than Winspear’s childhood on various farms.

I relished this vivid and evocative portrait of a writer’s life, a working-class life in a world far removed from today. I loved getting to know her parents and sharing, however briefly, in where their adventurous spirits led them.

Have you read Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels?

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston

by

barrac

After reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the leader of the 1831 slave uprising, I wanted to read a first person account from someone who had been a slave. This slim book, subtitled The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” fits the bill.

I was already familiar with Hurston from her novels, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, and knew she had studied with the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Here, she combines her anthropologist and storyteller skills to give us the story of Cudjo Lewis in his own words.

Born in the town of Banté in West Africa, Kossola, as he was known then, was captured by the Dahomey when they destroyed his town, taking the teenager and others to sell as slaves. At the time Hurston interviewed him in 1927, he was thought to be the only person still alive who had made the gruesome Middle Passage from Africa to the United States. His was the last group of slaves to make that journey.

A storyteller in the griot tradition, Kossola describes what life was like in his town, including marriage customs, how murderers are punished, and his own training to be a man. He tells of the Dahomey raid—“ ‘I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run ‘way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey head’”—and the long march to Dahomey where they are kept in the barracoon, or barracks, until the White slave traders come.

Hurston captures his voice by representing his dialect. Although I usually tire easily when trying to read dialect, I had no trouble here, easily falling into Kossola’s voice. The dialect adds authenticity to his story.

Dey takee de chain off us and placee us in de boats . . . When we ready to leave de Kroo boat and go in de ship, de Many-costs [a derisive term for the Kroos, an African tribe that works for the white men, called that because many of them can be hired for the cost of a good worker] snatch our country cloth off us. We try save our clothes, we ain’ used to be without no clothes on. But dey snatch all off us. Dey say, ‘You get plenty clothes where you goin’.’ Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ‘Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savages. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ‘way from us.

He goes on to describe his life as a slave, which lasted a little over five years, and after abolition, when he and the other slaves who had been brought on the Clotilda, those who hadn’t been sold elsewhere, built a town for themselves that they called African Town, today a community known as Africatown or Plateau, Alabama.

Religion is important to him and he is active in his church. He doesn’t see a disconnect between the faith of his childhood and the Christianity he learned in Alabama. He says that they worshiped the same god back in Africa, though they called him Alahua. Because they couldn’t read the Bible, they didn’t know he had a son.

This is not a traditional slave narrative, the story of an enslaved person escaping, trying to survive in the wilderness as they struggle to reach a place where they will be free. Instead, it starts with a free man, captured at 19 by fellow Africans and sold to White slavers—a fact that startled Hurston who had not realised that Black people were as responsible for the slave trade as White.

Hurston gives us a man who, despite the trauma and tragedies of his past, is someone much like us: retired, working in his garden, enjoying a good peach. We feel his love for his wife and their grief over the loss of two of their three children. His words touch us, especially his heartsick knowledge that he will now never see Africa again. He hopes that someday someone will carry his words back to that town in Africa where people will recognise his name and welcome him home.

This is a remarkable primary source for a time before any of us were born. Hurston completed the book in 1931, but it was rejected by publishers, partly because of the dialect. It was not published until 2018.

Do you ever pair two books that you’re reading, so that one complements the other?

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

by

Warmth

In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. In 1945 George Starling left Florida for New York City. In 1953 Robert Pershing Foster left Louisiana for Los Angeles.

They were part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of this remarkable movement.

The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages. There are historical sections complete with supporting statistics, but these are kept to a minimum and related to the stories we’re following. The author brings all the tools of fiction to keep us interested in this meticulously researched history.

World War I is usually considered to precipitating cause of the Great Migration. Black soldiers serving in the military and in Europe discovered that it was possible to escape Jim Crow. At the same time, factories and businesses in the north and west were desperate for workers since the flow of immigrants had basically halted and the military claimed many of the remaining men.

The scope of the Great Migration was not recognised for a long time. The effects were felt locally, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, but it wasn’t until southern businesses found they could no longer hire enough Black workers—whose wages had been kept artificially low by Jim Crow laws and local corruption—that the outcry began.

The last part of the book, almost one hundred pages, includes Wilkerson’s notes on her methodology, acknowledgments, endnotes and index, attesting to the solid underpinning of research. She says:

This book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists . . . The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analysis of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

It is that historical context that is the takeaway I most value from this book. Much of the information here was not new to me. Yet what stands out is how I now have a framework for all the pieces that I was already familiar with. I felt them slotting into place as I read.

One area I wish Wilkerson had covered in more depth, though obviously there wasn’t room for it, is the Black communities that flourished during segregation and then dissipated, partly through “urban renewal” demolitions and partly through integration. Wilkerson mentions it briefly in a few places, such as speaking of Harlem’s rise and fall. Robert Foster’s story, too, shows it in microcosm: as he aged, he left his prosperous private practice, where he was popular among his mostly Black patients, to join the staff of a Veterans’ Hospital. He missed being in charge and disliked having to answer to higher-ups who he believed discriminated against him, eventually forcing him out.

I will remember Robert’s story as well as those of Ida Mae and George for a long time. They brought to life the indignities of the Jim Crow South they fled and the different kinds of injustice and prejudice they found in their sanctuary cities, far worse than the discrimination that immigrants from other countries faced. Through these individuals, I have a better understanding of the people around me.

What nonfiction have you been reading?

Best Books I Read in 2021

by

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard

by

dillard

Dillard’s inimitable prose makes this memoir one of the best I’ve ever read. True, we are of an age, so much of her experience chimes with mine. I didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh where three huge rivers come together, but in another steel town, where rivers run into the bay and “old” money (much of it from Gilded Age robber barons) existed uneasily with a brawny, considerably immigrant working class.

Like Dillard, I was allowed to run free from a now-surprisingly young age, learning the neighborhood and later the city street by street, landmark by landmark. She captures the essence of the period in details and imagery, such as: “Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. “

Loosely organised by chronology, the individual sections each explore some aspect of childhood. There’s one about going to the library, one about summers at the lake with her grandparents, one about being afraid of the nuns at the Catholic school—“They had no bodies, and imitation faces.” She talks about her love of baseball and spending hours perfecting her overhand pitch only to find that as a girl she was only allowed to play softball.

Not uncommon occurrences, but the detail and the verve with which they come at us make reading this book a vivid and participatory experience. She writes of being five and terrified of going to bed because of the thing that enters her room at night, searching for her.

It was a transparent, luminous oblong. I could see the door whiten at its touch; I could see the blue wall turn pale where it raced over it, and see the maple headboard of Amy’s bed glow. It was a swift spirit; it was an awareness, it made noise. it had two joined parts, a head and a tail, like a Chinese dragon. it found the door, wall, and headboard; and it swiped, charging them with its luminous glance. After its fleet, searching passage, things looked the same, but weren’t.

I dared not blink or breathe; I tried to hush my whooping blood. If it found another awareness, it would destroy it.

Though she later figures out that it is a passing car reflecting a streetlight—the moment when she realises that reason is a tool to conquer fear—she still sometimes lets herself be afraid for the pleasurable frisson of terror.

The fragments work together to achieve a coherent narrative. One of the most astonishing threads has to with her becoming conscious of herself. She writes of lying on the kitchen floor, listening to the icebox motor, cars going by, the “unselfconscious trees.”

Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

Entering this book is like falling into flood that sweeps you away with a boundless enthusiastic drive to experience everything. We get not only these early years, but her exploratory middle years and frantic teens.

We see the beginnings of her interest in natural science that eventually flowered into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. We follow her into the rock collection she was gifted by a neighbor, labeling her eventual 340 rocks, imagining the task of searching for rare rocks. We see not only her wonder, but her imagery and realistic humor. “When you pry open the landscape, you find wonders—gems made of corpses, even, and excrement.” Prying open the landscape seems like the essence of Pilgrim.

A continuing thread is about leaving, achieving escape velocity. She begins with her father’s decision—likely a result of his compulsive reading and rereading of Life on the Mississippi—to “quit the firm his great-grandfather had founded” and take his boat down the river all the way to New Orleans, “the source of the music he loved: Dixieland jazz.” She was 10 at the time. He did come back, but his adventure haunts her throughout the book, all the way to the end when she herself takes off for college.

She gives us full and vital portraits of her parents, both of them huge jokesters, practicing jokes before unleashing them at parties or at home. Her mother, given to practical jokes, “dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously.” I envy Dillard some aspects of her parents: the jokes, the family dancing madly to records in the living room.

One aspect she doesn’t go into, which may speak to Pittsburgh’s population or to her being a little older than I, is race. For me, the increased pace of the Great Migration and the flight to the suburbs dramatically changed my home town. Dillard’s is a privileged childhood, more so than mine which was privileged enough. Privileged not only because it is a white childhood, not only because it is during a time of stability and prosperity, but also because it is a wealthy one.

While much of my enjoyment of this book was how much it recalled my own childhood, I imagine that people of all ages would enjoy it, not just for the portrait of a time now gone, but for the boundless energy of her amazing prose. I will be recommending it in the memoir classes I teach, for its structure, its detail, and its meditation on trying to connect the dots of your life, trying to find the connections that make them seem continuous.

What memoir have you read that took you back over your own life?

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

by

fire

This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?