Tag: memoir

Day 629: Giving Up the Ghost

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Cover for Giving Up the GhostBest Book of the Week!
In this gripping memoir, ghosts haunt author Hilary Mantel—the spectres of her past, her stepfather’s shade stumbling around the upper reaches of her holiday cottage, the spirit of her unborn daughter, the wisps of her yet unwritten books, and most confoundingly, the black smudge of an apparition that invaded her body when she was seven. Mantel’s is a memoir of wit, anger, and poetic truth.

It also meanders. It begins with the sale of Owl Cottage—where Hilary senses the ghost of her stepfather even though he never lived there—but then returns to the earliest memories of her childhood.

Of Irish Catholic parents, she grew up in the grim north England town of Hadfield, near Manchester. Although her family was poor, her earliest memories are the rich ones of her grandparents and aunts, who lived all along the lane, indulging the imagination of a child who was a knight of the round table, a red Indian, a priest, and was due to turn into a boy when she was four. To me, this last detail is one of the most charming. I can see this little girl.

Then a serious illness struck, changing her from a sturdy tough child with long black hair to a wispy, frail blonde girl, no longer due to change to a boy. From then on it seemed she was robbed of her true self.

The memoir details her rigid Catholic school education, where she developed an intolerance for ridiculous questions, from those asked by her teachers. It also tells of the more profound loss of her childhood, when her mother moved the family out of that lane of relatives so that she could take up life with her lover, Jack. Hilary’s father Henry was relegated to the status of a lodger and then left behind when Hilary won a place at a better school, never to be seen again.

The most debilitating events of her life began when she was a young married woman studying law. The extreme pains in her legs were diagnosed by patronizing and sexist doctors as mental rather than physical problems, caused by the stress of her studies on her feeble female brain, and she was treated first with Valium and later with anti-psychotics. What she actually had was endometriosis, which she finally diagnosed herself. It was left untreated so long that she ended up having a hysterectomy at age 29. She had put off having a child, and it was too late. The effects on her health continue to this day.

Mantel’s memoir is vividly and beautifully written. She strips herself bare, and it is unforgettable.

Day 600: My Father’s Eyes

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Cover for My Father's EyesWhen she was in high school, author Sheila Allee discovered that her father had a brother she didn’t know existed. Melrose Allee, nicknamed Pie, was born with profound intellectual disabilities. Once Allee’s father “Dub,” who had taken much of the burden for Melrose’s care, left home in 1937, his parents placed Melrose in Austin State School. Even though her father was angry with his parents and swore to get his brother out, he never did, and Melrose eventually became an unmentioned subject.

Sheila could not understand how her family could have institutionalized her uncle in the first place and even worse, how they could have left him for years, unvisited. When she moved to Austin as an adult, she set about finding Melrose, eventually locating him in Travis State School in 1991.

This short book is the touching story of Allee’s own self-discovery through the agency of her impaired uncle. It is also the story of her discovery of the profoundly disturbing beliefs and practices surrounding the mentally handicapped that were practiced in this country in the first half of the 20th century.

In the interests of full disclosure, I know Ms. Allee, and I received a copy of her book in return for an honest review.

Day 591: Goodbye to All That

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Cover for Goodbye to All ThatThis is my book for the most recent Classics Club Spin! I originally announced that I would post my review a day late, on October 7, but I decided to post it early instead, so as to meet the spin deadline, since Monday, the deadline, is Literary Wives.

Goodbye to All That is the only memoir by Robert Graves, written in his 30’s about a dozen years after World War I. Nowadays, Graves may be best known as the author of I, Claudius, but the publication of Goodbye to All That was extremely controversial. It was one of the first memoirs about the war, and it was one of the most critical.

But before Graves turned a satiric eye on the war, he pointed it at the public school system. I did not always understand what was going on in his boy’s school, but the layers of hierarchy and the customs seem ridiculous. Not surprisingly, this same complexity extends to the different regiments in the military and their customs—where to wear their decorations, what to wear (for one regiment in France, the answer is shorts), and who may speak or drink in the officer’s mess.

Graves, who enlisted early in the war at the age of 21, was soon viewing it all skeptically. One scene of high satire takes place in a meeting of battalion officers, who are all called in to listen to the complaints of their colonel that the men aren’t buttoning their pocket flaps and so on—the worst offence being that he heard a soldier actually call a noncommissioned officer “Jack”! This meeting takes place at the same time that the division is issuing commands for the men to perform impossible missions that would have gotten them all killed had they not been cancelled at the last minute.

Graves also deals somewhat facetiously with the premature reports of his own death, sent by the military to his family after he was wounded, by putting a polite announcement in the Times.

This memoir is interesting enough, although at times I could not follow the nuances of the events, having no knowledge of British school or military terms. There is a short glossary of military terms at the beginning of the book, but it is insufficient. These days, news of incompetency and jingoism during the war is no surprise, but when this book was published, it was the cause of a storm of letters containing all kinds of accusations against Graves.

Day 588: I Await the Devil’s Coming

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Cover for I Await the Devil's ComingI had a strong reaction to I Await the Devil’s Coming, which I will explain in a moment. This book was written in 1901 and belongs in the category of confessional literature. It apparently was quite a sensation at the time and had a great following by young women.

Mary MacLane was a 19-year-old woman living in a Montana mining town. In the book she declares herself a genius and an egoist who is waiting for her life to start when the Devil takes her away to be his love. This book is claimed as an early feminist work, and in the introduction, there is a statement to the effect that if MacLane had been a young man, she could have gone off and made her mark.

I don’t see this book as a feminist work at all but more likely as an expression of mental illness. I have met a similar person in a relative, who complained that life was hell on earth and that the people of our town were all provincial philistines. MacLane wasn’t going to act, she was waiting for things to happen to her. You could reply that in her time and place there was nothing a respectable woman could do to change her life, but of course, MacLane didn’t care about being respectable, at least she said she didn’t.

MacLane was mentally ill not because she said she was waiting for the Devil, but because she showed signs of severe depression alternating with fervor and euphoria, and she heard voices. If she had been a young man, she would have been incapable of striking out on her own and making a success of herself.

In fact, she did not. Her book was published and she was kicked out of the house. We don’t really know how she led her life after that. She wrote another book years later that was not a success, and she died alone in her 40’s in a hotel room.

It is a sad story. The book is well written, visceral at times, but it is not a feminist masterpiece. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist. George Eliot was to some extent a feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist. Mary MacLane was not.

Could the situation of women at the turn of the century make a woman ill? That is another question. Charlotte Perkins Gilman obviously thought so.

 

Day 583: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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Cover for I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThe picture on the cover of my old copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings shows an angry and dignified woman, and in some ways this is an angry memoir. Although I’m sure this anger helped sustain Maya Angelou during a difficult life and pushed her to make significant advances for herself and her people, I hope she became happier later. She earned it.

This book is the powerful story of the first 16 years of Maya Angelou’s life. She and her brother Bailey were raised by their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas, after being sent there alone on a train from California at the ages of three and four by their parents. Much of the book deals with her upbringing by a strict and religious, somewhat reserved but caring grandmother in the racially segregated South.

Although life in Stamps was no picnic, her brief visit to her mother in St. Louis when she was eight was disastrous. There she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. That was not the only event in her life that could have proved catastrophic.

Angelou speaks with raw transparency about the feelings of insecurity that she battled through her girlhood, a combination of her treatment by whites and her own feelings of unattractiveness. In her younger years she was saved by her love of reading, later by her own dignity and will to succeed.

This book is deeply involving and at the same time sometimes disturbing reading. I was brought to tears at the description of Angelou’s nearly ruined graduation, not when the pompous white guest speaker put the class in its place, but by how the valedictorian rescued the occasion. I was thrilled when Angelou’s perseverance won her a position, at the age of 15, as the first African-American cable car employee of San Francisco.

I think this story of pride and dignity against bigotry is inspiring for anyone.

Day 555: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

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Cover for Mastering the Art of Soviet CookingAlthough Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is billed as a memoir, it is written with the help of the author’s mother and begins long before Von Bremzen was born, with the start of the Soviet Union. It is an unusual memoir, tracing as it does the history of the Soviet Union, decade by decade, through the meals cooked by one family.

In an entertainingly wry writing style, Von Bremzen relates the changes in Soviet approaches to government over time and the way these changes affected the populace. She begins by explaining how Lenin’s asceticism nearly eliminated Russian cuisine because of the idea that food was decadent (and hardly any food was available).

Von Bremzen ironically and knowingly traces the history of Soviet Russia through famine and glut, for each decade featuring a dish that seems to represent it (although one decade features ration cards). The recipes are at the end.

Von Bremzen relates her own mother’s history as the rebellious daughter of a prominent Soviet military officer, her mother totally rejecting the party line. Larisa was terrified throughout the Stalinist era and longed to leave the country. Anya, herself with a difficult start as a child not allowed to join the Young Pioneers or visit Lenin’s tomb (things she secretly yearned for), had finally found a comfortable place when her mother dragged her off to Philadelphia.

This amusing book is fascinating for people who are interested in Russia, which I have always been. Darkly funny are the countless contrasts between the official views of the country and Von Bremzen’s descriptions of the actual plight of the population. It is difficult to describe the divided viewpoint of the author, who obviously loves Russia and the 60’s vision of what it was, while at the same time being deeply skeptical of everything about it.

This book is unusual, intelligent, and well-written, about a woman’s attempts to reconcile her feelings about her country and upbringing.

Day 508: Conversations with Myself

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Cover for Conversations with MyselfI was deeply disappointed with Conversations with Myself, which reads as if it was thrown together by people who don’t know much about publishing or the interests of readers. It was assembled from notes, diary extracts, letters, and interviews, probably without much interaction with the man himself. (Although it is solely credited to Mandela, it is fairly obvious from some of the notes that it was put together by committee.)

Context is one of the biggest problems with the book, that and organization. Perhaps some attempt was made to order the excerpts by subject or time. It is hard to tell. But except for short notes about where the information came from, no effort is made to explain the context of the excerpts. It is as if the editors of the book are assuming that its readers are intimately familiar with the events in Mandela’s life. He makes a journey, for example, and writes about it in his diary, but there is no introduction about the journey’s purpose.

One of the first things I encountered on beginning to read (besides three typos on the first two pages) was a note that an entry was from a letter to a particular person. The back of the book includes an alphabetical list with descriptions of some of the people mentioned. Naturally, I wanted to understand who Mandela was writing to. But the name was not listed.

Even if it had been listed, the information there is written like an abbreviated biographical dictionary or business résumé—in partial sentences, listing the person’s work positions, accomplishments, imprisonments, with lots of acronyms. When I am reading a book like this, I want to know the person’s relationship to Mandela. I want to read a blurb that gives me some sense of the person. I want to know if someone was Mandela’s friend for many years or a trusted colleague. As an extreme example, sandwiched between Winnie Mandela’s employment history and memberships in various organizations is the bald statement “Married to Nelson Mandela, 1958-96 (separated 1992).” That’s it for Winnie.

Let’s not forget the acronyms and organizations. Between my early attempts to look up names and acronyms in the back and the little information gleaned from doing so, I soon gave up referring to that list. As an example of the type of information offered, the African National Congress is explained in terms of its founding date, the dates it was banned, and its current status. But why was it formed? What are its goals? What has it achieved? Of course, I have heard of it for years, but I really don’t know much about it. Again, context.

This book could have been effective and interesting with more attempts to organize the material, write more informative introductions, and rework the appendix. Instead, it is simply confusing, with a few gems of thoughtful prose. I wish I had read The Long Walk to Freedom instead.

Day 499: Literary Wives! The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story

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Cover for The Zookeeper's Wife

Here it is time for another Literary Wives club meeting. Please also see the reviews of my fellow “wives!”

If you have read the book and would like to participate, you can add comments to any of our pages or to the Literary Wives Facebook page.

Let’s get right to the book!

The Zookeeper’s Wife tells the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabiński, the keeper of the Warsaw zoo and his wife during World War II. After the bombardment by the Germans and their invasion, the Zabińskis struggled to keep the zoo animals alive, but they were also responsible for providing temporary shelter in the zoo grounds and in their house to hundreds of Jews. Jan, who was a member of the Polish Underground, found ways of smuggling people out of the ghetto, and he and Antonina kept them at the zoo until they could be placed elsewhere, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for longer periods.

The book is rich with details about life in their unusual household, full of animals and of hidden people who came out cautiously at night. It tells stories of lucky escapes and frightening encounters with the Nazis. It also provides information about life in the ghetto and some of its heroic leaders. I found some of these stories extremely touching, such as that of Henryk Goldzmit, a children’s author who went by Janusz Korczak. He abandoned his literary career to found an orphanage for Jewish children, and when the Nazis decided to ship all the children to Treblinka and almost certain death, went with them so they would not be frightened.

Although some of Ackerman’s many digressions from the main story add interest and color to the book, I unfortunately found others disruptive to the flow. For example, she spends more than a page on Jacques Offenbach simply because Antonina played one of his pieces on the piano to warn the hidden residents when strangers approached. Ackerman, a nature writer, spends another very long paragraph just listing the types of bugs in an insect collection entrusted to the Zabińskis. After awhile, these digressions began to feel like padding.

I also felt that Ackerman’s writing sometimes verges a little too closely on fiction. She is prone to rather florid descriptions of things she can only be imagining, often including inapt or odd metaphorical language. Although she introduces the book by saying she got the dialogue directly from Antonina’s diaries, she fictionalizes other things, such as the thoughts of sculptor Magdalena Gross, that could not have come from her sources. This style of writing for a nonfiction subject makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I read this book when it first came out and remembered it as a work of fiction.

What does the book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

Literary Wives logoIn what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife?”

It is interesting to me that Jan Zabiński describes Antonina at one time as “just a housewife,” because she is clearly so much more than that. She helps him administer the zoo and take care of the animals even before the war. During the war, she takes care of a household of refugees while Jan is out until late most nights and is gone for some extended periods of time. Although he is described as authoritarian and occasionally harsh, he trusts her implicitly to run things and keep everyone safe, even through scary encounters with Nazi officials and drunk soldiers. Although she would define herself as a wife and her husband as the master of the house, it is clear that the two respect each other and trust each other to handle difficult and dangerous situations. Antonina also defines herself as a mother, with the fierce determination to protect her children and her other charges.

 

Day 492: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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Cover for The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt KidThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is billed as a memoir, but it is even more a collection of information and odd facts about 1950’s America, each chapter headed by a strange newspaper clipping from the time. This book is one of nostalgia similar to the work of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose works centered on a slightly earlier time and author of the books that spawned A Christmas Story.

The memoirs bear many similarities to Shepherd’s, possibly because of the similarities in the imaginations and predilections of young boys, although Bryson’s continue on into the 1960’s and lose a lot of their innocence as the boys become obsessed with gaining glimpses of naked women and stealing beer. I’m guessing that a lot of the humor, with its emphasis on body functions and pranks, would be more amusing to men than to women.

Still, I found the book mildly funny. It turns out that I am roughly one month older than Bill Bryson, so I can vividly remember many of the things that Bryson relates as curiosities, clambering under our desks for the absurd air raid drills, for example, or going to view model air-raid shelters. Bryson grew up in Des Moines, a much bigger town than my own, so his memories are a little more urban than mine.

One place where my memory differs from his is in his repeated assertions that the Russians would never bomb Des Moines. When I was in the seventh grade, I distinctly remember being forced to watch an “educational” film during which we were informed that our town was among the top three bombing targets in the country (which is, of course, absurd, but we believed it). My subsequent informal research (occasionally asking people) has lead me to believe that every school child in America was told the same thing.

Readers Bryson’s age can take a brief look back through time in an afternoon of light reading. Younger readers might be surprised at some of the tidbits Bryson has uncovered, but they were no surprise to me.

Day 461: My Life in Middlemarch

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Cover for My Life in MiddlemarchMy Life in Middlemarch is a difficult book to categorize and an unusual effort. It is part memoir, part literary criticism, part literary history and biography, part thoughtful examination. Its focus is on George Eliot’s greatest novel, Middlemarch.

New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead muses about what the novel, her favorite as it is mine, has meant to her during different periods of her life, how different parts of the novel and different characters have spoken to her and how her sympathies with characters and comprehension of the novel’s themes have changed as her life was in its varying stages. She also examines events in Eliot’s own life—how they and the people she knew may have contributed to her works.

This book is about all things Middlemarch. Mead visits the towns and homes where Eliot resided and places where she may have set the novel. She reports on the ways that literary criticism of the novel changed over time—how it was immediately popular and then fell out of favor in later years to be rehabilitated, partially by the appreciation of Virginia Woolf. The book provides interesting insights into the novel and into Eliot’s life and possible thought processes as she wrote the novel.

http://www.netgalley.comFor those who have not read Middlemarch, the book still may hold some interest, but a lot will be lost. To those who have read and loved it, you will probably, like me, be compelled to pick it up again and reread it. I’ll be doing that soon.