Perfect Memoirs

I've been trawling through a part of my own history this weekend—through file folders stuffed with xeroxed passages, quotes, and lecture notes, with old book reviews and essays, with pitched-forward questions. I wanted to see, as I prepare to teach at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, just what I'd once been thinking. I wanted to measure my progress since then.

The exercise is bittersweet. It involves recalling books that I could not live without—but have, for a decade or more. It evokes wonder at my own wonder. It settles me into a slower unit of time. It reminds me of the power that books still have over me.

I was a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun, years ago, when Michael Pakenham was at the helm. In the big pile of things that I've been sorting through this weekend, I found a Sun piece I'd written on memoir. Tucked within were thoughts on memoirs. I share a few of passages from that essay with you, my book-loving blogger friends. I cherished these books then; I cherish them now:

I might not have learned to love the memoir form—or begin to write it—had I not happened upon Natalie Kusz’s miraculous Road Song in 1990. The story of the author’s long recovery from a ferocious attack of a pack of Alaskan dogs, Road Song was, for me, the revelation of a form. Here was the past delivered with equanimity and respect. Here was a terrible tragedy gentled by words, a book in which the good is everpresent with the bad. Kusz writes to comprehend, and not to condemn. She writes her way back to herself, and as she does, she broadens the reader’s perspective, disassembles bitterness, heals. Road Song begins in the spirit of adventure, not with despair. Road Song begins with an “our” and not an “I” and reverberates out, like a hymn. There is no selling out here. Just a hand reaching out across the page.

It is the same with The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, a book by first-time author Kathleen Finneran. With The Tender Land, Finneran is asking vast, impossible questions about love and loss. She is restoring a long-lost brother to the page, a boy named Sean, who kills himself at the age of fifteen for reasons no one can fathom. Why did Sean swallow his father’s heart medicine? Who was responsible for his sadness? What should Finneran herself have known to protect this brother from his fate? These are personal questions, certainly, very particular details, one family, one love, one loss. But as Finneran tells her story, she urges her readers deep into themselves, asks them to consider those whom they too love, and whether or not they have loved fully enough. Finneran’s fine prose operates as a prayer—not just for both her brother, but for her readership.

Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert is another exquisite example of the memoir form—a book of escape and discovery, exhaustion and surrender and relief. Morrow’s book takes readers out far beyond where most have ever been—to the sands of Egypt, to the company of exotic beasts and plants—and somehow yields up passages that speak directly to the experience of humankind.

“I thought of memory as a blanket,” Morrow writes of her traveling days. “I could take a thing out of my mind and handle it as though it were part of some beautiful fabric I carried with me, things that had happened long ago, the faces of people I loved, the words of a poem I had long since forgotten I knew. This was something any nomad or illiterate peasant knew: the intangible treasure of memory, or memorized words.” Morrow’s readers don’t have to go to Egypt to make this discovery. Morrow has made it for them, and has loved it with words, for their sake.