I’ve written about family for years, first in poems and then in nonfiction. I was estranged from my father at the time of his death from alcoholic cirrhosis, and I wrote a memoir to think through this relationship and the way we use narrative to make sense of our families. Everyone has secret histories, and they’re endlessly fascinating. For 15 years, I taught at Stanford University, where I began a course called Family Stories. People came to write their own fundamental, funny, difficult stories in the company of others. I still love teaching this kind of writing at my new college and in my private classes.
Fleur Jaeggy’s writing preserves the mysteries of being alive, especially the mysteries of being a child.
I love how her writing moves back and forth in time and tense—is it the past or the present, childhood or adulthood?—with such ease that it’s impossible not to feel the slippage between reality and memory. Plus, every sentence is gorgeous.
Whenever I think about not knowing my own father, or I have the suspicion that nothing and no one is truly knowable, or I simply want to remember what it feels like to be in the company of brilliant writing, I read Jaeggy.
Compressed, delicate, but brutally precise, S. S. Proleterka is a fiercely boiled-down bildungsroman from the presiding genius of dry-ice, Fleur Jaeggy. The S. S. Proleterka is a Yugoslavian ship; our fifteen-year-old protagonist and her financially ruined, distant, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together on it to Greece. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she receives her father's ashes, our heroine recounts her youth: her re-married mother, cold and far away, allows the father the rare visit to the child, stashed away with relatives or at a school for girls. "The journey to Greece, father…
I may never have written nonfiction had I not read and taught these astonishing essays. (I first read this book nearly twenty years ago, and I still teach Beard’s essays.)
Beard makes me believe in the complete personhood of her young narrators (sometimes young enough to be sleeping in cribs), and their ability to be the vehicle through which she can remember and make visible a family’s truths, secrets, and hilarities.
Beard’s work gave me license to turn my own younger self into a character who, with her intuitive understanding of her own family, could do battle for me on the page.
The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation.
Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an…
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
Our ghosts speak to us—especially the ghosts of our dead parents.
I’m captivated by Gordon’s double biography of this mother-daughter pair (in fact, I gobbled it up in a few sittings). Gordon’s telling of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Shelley’s life and thinking—beginning with the story of young Mary learning to read by tracing the words on her mother’s gravestone—is necessary for all of us who are interested in family legacy.
The book is so smart in revealing the lives of these two radical writers, and so soothing in its understanding of gripping storytelling, that I also listened to it as an audiobook on a cross-country road trip to see my own mother early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Without this book, I may never have made it through Nevada.
***AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4*** NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
'A gripping account of the heartbreaks and triumphs of two of history's most formidable female intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Gordon has reunited mother and daughter through biography, beautifully weaving their narratives for the first time.' Amanda Foreman
English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and author Mary Shelley were mother and daughter, yet these two extraordinary women never knew one another. Nevertheless, their passionate and pioneering lives remained closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies eerily similar.
Both women became famous writers and wrote books that changed literary history,…
By the time I reached Native Guard’s central crown of sonnets, Trethewey already had me with her blues poem and palindrome.
I love the formal-mindedness of this collection—also its authority and fearlessness. I admire the way Trethewey unites personal history (the speaker’s memories of childhood; her experience as a woman of color; her mother’s tragic death) and collective history (the unremembered Native Guard; systemic racism; the legacies of slavery and the Civil War).
Her poems help us ask the big questions together: what memories are held or erased by a community of people? How might collective grief inform private grief and vice versa? What happens if our stories are not remembered, and what work can writing do to help us not forget? And also: “Incident” is one of the best pantoums out there.
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.? The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey's…
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
Bechdel uses her narrator as a vehicle for thinking (in this case, for thinking through a narrator’s complex relationship with her mother), using a constellation of sources from Donald Winnicott to Virginia Woolf to The Sound of Music. She perfects the illusion/truth central to this genre: that we’re witnessing the writer’s process of discovery in real time.
When I’m inside the book, I feel as though I’m inside Bechdel’s brain. I know this feeling is a testament to her craft, but I still couldn’t help thinking, when I finished the book, that Bechdel was my friend. I wanted to call her up to continue our conversation about our parents—even though we’ve never met.
An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven.
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf.
Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author’s father, from whom she'd been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his indebted estate? The job of the executor is to transform the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the job of the writer is to transform the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory.
Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? And what does it mean to write true “nonfiction”? With surprising humor, real tenderness, and a daring formal inventiveness, Executrix launches a critical investigation into family stories and secrets, and the genre of memoir itself.
