the story is what got you here: Gail Caldwell and other books of summer

I have a dream, and it is this: to make this, the summer of friendship, also the summer of books. Both things at the same time. My idea of heaven.

(Throw a few good meals in, and it would be exponential heaven.)

Recently, with readerly hopes, I went out and bought some new books. To add to the piles of books not yet read. I don't know. I could not help it. On my list:

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us (James Nestor)

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The Frangipangi Hotel (Violet Kupersmith)

Hungry (Heather Swain)

Sekret (Lindsay Smith)

I also bought Gail Caldwell's new memoir, because of course I had to; anyone who loves memoir must. Caldwell's truth talk is exemplary, which is to say that her stories are always bigger than herself. Caldwell never talks at us, as some memorists do. She draws us up at her table, gives us some tea, and makes room for conversation.

New Life, No Instructions is a slender volume—a story about a woman who has never married, who has no children, who has recently lost her best friend and her beloved parents, whose hip is finally giving way. What will send her living forward? What lessons are there in the intimacies of friendships that are built out of years and proximity?

Caldwell doesn't have all the answers; she doesn't pretend to. But she searches with such tremendous authenticity, she yields such simple and lovely vignettes, she honors those who have passed on, she is alive, she is on her river.

And she talks to us about telling the truth about the stories that have made us who we are. Words for all of us:

I've also been asked if I was resentful about getting a new diagnosis as late as I did, at least a decade beyond the initial symptoms that indicated my hip was failing. The answer is no, and not because I'm trying to be valiant. I think it's because of all the years I've spent in AA meetings, listening to people's stories. They can be terrible stories, full of anguish and fear and disrepair. But the point is not to spin the narrative; that defeats purpose, in some way, of story itself. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

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Dr. Radway is most generously read by Melissa Sarno

You know that part in the magnificent Gail Caldwell memoir Let's Take the Long Way Home, in which Gail is reflecting on an early juncture in her friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp? Gail, the older, more established writer, has been engaged with Caroline's work. Caroline has asked for Gail to read; Caroline has asked for Gail's opinion; Gail has reliably responded.

Caroline, however, has never said a word about the work Gail has done, and the vulnerability of not knowing, the inequality of the playing field, has begun to rub away at Gail. Finally Gail asks, "I have to ask you something difficult—I need to know what you think about my work." Caroline, fortunately, is right there with a reassuring, loving answer.

Melissa Sarno, a young woman I met at a BEA exhibit years ago, a young woman whose writing impresses not just me, but her many blog fans and her brand new agent (wait until you someday read Melissa's Coney Island novel), is one of those people who has never left me wondering. She has, indeed, been a most generous, and perceptive, reader of my work, and I will be forever grateful.

Last evening, late, Melissa wrote to tell me that she had read a book she knows means the world to me, a book with a quiet release, a book I still have high hopes for—Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. Melissa read and took the time to post these words about the book on her fabulous blog, and to share her favorite paragraph. A few lines from Melissa's blog here, below. I am moved, as a friend and a writer, by the whole.

Thank you so much, Melissa Sarno.

That is what I love, love, love about this book.  The fullness and richness of this writhing adventure. Each sentence swells with the endurance of characters that are, in many ways, running on empty, past empty, but with their hearts bursting full at their worn seams.

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Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp/two memoirs, two friends

Let's Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell's classic and classically beautiful memoir of friendship, hit me deeply when I first read it.  It is a dignified book, a true story of loss.  Caldwell had written of her friend, the writer Caroline Knapp, who had fought off anorexia and alcoholism by the time the two met, and who had shared, with Caldwell, a love of rivers and of dogs.  Caldwell had written of Knapp's dying, from lung cancer, just as Knapp's life was finally making sense.  Personal happiness and calm had been found.  A door had opened.  Cancer slammed it shut.

Caldwell's memoir left me with a lingering desire to know more about Caroline Knapp, and yesterday I finally read Drinking: A Love Story, the famously famous memoir about Knapp's slide into and recovery from alcoholism. I'm not sure why I had avoided this book for so long.  I'm not sure what I thought it would be.  But what I discovered, in Drinking, was an immeasurably intelligent and quiet voice.  I found a woman I am sure I would have liked.

There isn't the bravado, in Drinking, of the Big Survivor.  There isn't the boast one sometimes hears in the recounting of harrowing tales—Can you believe I was like that?  Can you imagine I survived?  I know it's nasty, I know I was a jerk, but secretly, really, wasn't it all kind of wondrous, in a twisted (I'll admit it) way?  There isn't the sense that Knapp believes her story trumps all other tales. There is only the sense that perhaps by telling her tale—by exploring the slide, the massive deceptions, the dangers, the heat and seeming loveliness of alcohol, the balm of community—she may be helpful to others.  This is not memoir as exorcism or exhibitionism, in other words.  It's not a memoir in which the rememberer pretends to remember any more than she does.  It's a book that is moving and hopeful and sad.  It's impact, on me, will forever linger.

I returned to Caldwell's memoir after finishing Drinking.  I read again those opening pages.  I understood—it was even clearer now—the size of Caldwell's loss.

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Half a Life/Darin Strauss: Reflections

Dignity is a word I have long associated with Darin Strauss.  His refined mind and sensibilities were on display in novels like Chang and Eng.  A certain quietude pervaded interviews.  When I learned that Strauss was sending a memoir into the world, a memoir entrusted to McSweeney's (and hence, in some fashion, to the multiply talented and deeply generous Dave Eggers), I knew for certain what I'd be reading next.

I read Half a Life this morning, grateful for every white-steeped page.  It is, as you must have heard by now, the story of an accidental death—the story of what happened one day when Strauss set out to play some "putt putt" with his high school friends.  He was 18, behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile.  On the margin of the road, two cyclists pedaled forward.  Of a sudden, there was a zag, a knock, an "hysterical windshield." A cyclist, a girl from Strauss's school, lay dying on the road. She'd crossed two lanes of highway to reach Strauss's car.  He braked, incapable of forestalling consequences.

It was forever.  It was always.  A girl had died.  A boy had lived.  Strauss spent his college years, his twenties, his early thirties incapable of reconciling himself to the facts, of entrusting them to friends.  There's much he can't remember perfectly.  There are gaps, white space, breakage—all of which, in this McSweeney's production, is rendered with utmost decency—the thoughts broken into small segments, big breaths (blank pages) taken in between.  There is knowing here, not shouting.  There is an exploration of guilt, and no bravado. 

Half a Life sits now, on my shelf, beside Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home—two memoirs that transcend precisely because they are so quiet, so well considered, so honorable. These books, along with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning, give me hope that memoir, the form, is finding its center again.  There may not be any sure-fired truths, but there are consequences.  There may be stories, but they are always tangled.  There may be ache, but there is solace, too.  There may be drama, but in drama's wake, we stand.  In need of understanding.  In need of one another.

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Let's Take the Long Way Home/Gail Caldwell: Reflections

If there was ever a book I wanted the moment I heard of its existence, it was this one. 

If there was ever a book that conformed to my abstract idealization of it, it was, again, this one—Gail Caldwell's finely crafted, thoroughly beautiful, absolutely heartbreaking Let's Take the Long Way Home.  This is, of course, the story of Caldwell's dear friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp—the story of long walks taken with beloved dogs, of the glass face of rowed-upon water, of pasts and imperfections and desires entrusted, one to the other, of a cancer diagnosis and of a death, Caroline Knapp's, when she was at the prime of her life  and the center, in so many ways, of Caldwell's world.

Home is a memoir filled with perfectly wrought particulars:  "I often went out in early evening, when the wildlife had settled and the shoreline had gone from harsh brightness to Monet's gloaming, and then I would row back to the dock in golden light, the other scullers moving like fireflies across the water."  But it is also a memoir so wise and teaching, so fundamentally true ("...it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but breathing") that it occurrs to me that anyone who has ever suffered loss—which is to say anyone at all—should buy this book and keep it near for all the wisdom it has to offer. 

For that is what Home has most abundantly to offer—hard, lived-in wisdom for souls who lose and hearts that break.  Home is not a tale about how Caldwell survived the loss of her best friend, though Caldwell has survived.  It is instead both instruction and allegory on the power of kindness and small gestures, the fidelity of friendship and memory, the tenacity and tenuousness that make us our own complicated people in need of other complicated people.  Caroline Knapp is no longer here; she isn't.  But because Caldwell has written such an exquisite book, she can now be found, by all of us, in the bright, ephemeral gloaming. 

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The Prologue in Memoir

Last night, in part two of my two-part class,"Very First Words," we spoke of the prologues that seem to launch so many memoirs—the pronouncements of theme and tone, the pencil strokes of frame, the percolated entanglements of story lines. We read out loud from books in the making and looked for wasteland stretches that might be eradicated, flat horizons in need of sky, opportunities to turn complication into complexity.

This morning, a day of corporate work begins (interviews! a succession of stories! schedule management!), and I'm about to put my many books back onto the shelves. Before I do, though, I share four teachable prologues, should you be weighing beginnings in your own mind.

We went there for everything we needed.... Most of all we went there when we needed to be found (The Tender Bar/J.R. Moehringer).

For a long time, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was (A Strong West Wind/Gail Caldwell).

Everything about Great Salt Lake is exaggerated—the heat, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain.... Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life (Refuge/Terry Tempest Williams).

So, dear son, where to begin? It could be the August morning I stood on our front steps wondering whether to go in for a jacket, but first let me step back as far as I can and say that what I remember most about my beginnings, besides the voice of my mother striding down through layers of dark to where I lay under the wonder of the onrush of sleep, is how I felt set apart (A Step from Death, Larry Woiwode).

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