Memoir Instructives: Joyce Carol Oates and Dorothy Allison

Now in the throes of finalizing Handling the Truth, I read or re-read memoir upon memoir—checking myself and my assertions against examples both global and timeless.  It has been interesting, then, to read Joyce Carol Oates' newish A Widow's Story alongside Dorothy Allison's classic Two or Three Things I Know For Sure—one very thick and one very thin, both embroidered with italicized epiphanies, things learned.  Perhaps it is the brevity of Allison's work (words first written to be performed) that makes her learning so riveting.  Perhaps it is the lyric return, those two or three things, the manner in which Allison speaks to herself and (in sideways fashion) speaks to us:

Two of three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seeds in a wind.

And

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now.

Oates's voice, on the other hand, is more external, more deliberately instructive.  It is harder around the edges, tensile with new grief:

Advice to the Widow:  Do not think that grief is pure, solemn, austere and "elevated"—this is not Mozart's Requiem Mass.  Think instead Spike Jones, those unfunny "classical" musical jokes involving tubas and bassoons.  

And

How many widows have made this futile call—dialed numbers which are their own numbers; how many widows have listened to their dead husband's voices again, again—again...

As you will too, one day.  If you are the survivor.  

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