memoirreviews

A Child of True Believers

2010-08-03T06:54:00.001-07:00

"I survived Catholic school!" proclaimed a bumper sticker message that periodically appeared on cars some years ago. Said Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Are Free (Dial Press, 2010) could logically show his own adaptation of that message, "I survived the Socialist Workers Party childhood." In fact his story even has a parallel with the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal that has been so well publicized in recent times. As a four-year-old, Said was the sex abuse victim of a Socialist Workers Party member in whose care his mother left him one evening. And when his mother reported it to the party, (but not to the police) a party representative blew her away saying, "Under capitalism, everyone has problems." She might as well have written to the Vatican.
But we are getting too far ahead of the story. Said has a much stronger identity than just that of a one-time sex abuse victim. The son of (an absent) Iranian immigrant father and a mother born "Martha Finkelstein," he was a prisoner of their particular political obsession Despite the vast cultural gap between the backgrounds of his parents, they had a common bond as "true believers," devotees of the Socialist Workers Party.
Said's father split when Said was a child, not to see his son for years - and then only during occasional brief and awkward reunions. During one such meeting, a dinner to belatedly celebrate Said's birthday, his father showed him a recent edition of the party's newspaper which he regularly talked around town. "How much does it cost?" The birthday boy asked. "It's a calculated question," Said writes, hoping his father would offer it to him in lieu of a more appropriate gift. "A dollar 50," his father says in a tone that clearly says, "you have to pay."
Because of his father's "normal" absence from his life Said has virtually no Iranian identity, save the fact of his name and his Middle Eastern looking face, both of which created serious difficulties for him when he was in seventh grade in 1979 when American jingoism and intolerance ran high because of the hostage crisis in Iran.
Unfortunately for Said, although his mother loved him in her fashion, she too contributed to his childhood of deprivation. Despite her college education, she chose lower paying jobs that she might otherwise have had, relegating the two of them to life in a series of cramped apartments. She also held onto a fantasy that Said's father would eventually reunite with her.
Said's mother also regularly dragged the boy to party meetings and weekend party conferences and importantly, inculcated the parties mythology as he was growing up.
Despite the neglect to which it Said was exposed, like the best of the genre, his memoir is a beautiful work of art that dispassionately describes a bizarre childhood with nary a hint of self-pity. A variety of scenes are likely to stay in my mind for some time: Said in Cuba as a 12-year-old during a weeklong visit in the company of party members, but without his mother. Said standing up before his middle school classmates for a show and tell sort of exercise, stating that he holds in his hand an article about a minority candidate for the presidency during the election which resulted in Khomeini coming to power. But he becomes tongue-tied and does not tell them that the candidate is his father.
"All happy childhoods are the same, but unhappy childhoods are not," Tolstoy might have written. There are numerous memoirs about bizarre and unhappy childhoods. Many are interesting even if they're not well written. Said's is more than interesting and it is beautifully written.

THE WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD?

2010-07-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a wonderful memoir conference at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck New York.

The program featured some wonderful writers including Susanna Sonnenberg, Darcy Steinke, Nick Flynn James Kullander, Fred Poole, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Susanna Sonnenberg, Darcey Steinke and Marta Szabo.

The two surviving memoir writing brothers of the "Flying McCourts" (my designation) were also on the program, but Malachy, the second oldest brother broke his hip and was in rehab. The youngest, Alphie, a wonderful writer and a charming, low-key, witty man with a marble intelligence did make it, however.

I'll talk first about Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death: A Memoir, who now lives in Montana. Susanna, 44, is a survivor of a traumatic childhood. "You win, Susanna Sonnenberg. You have the worst mother in the world, " said one reviewer in reaction to her book.”A voice with a lot of integrity . . . a fantastic writer" said another reviewer. In brief, Susanna's mother gave her cocaine when she was 12, and seduced Susanna's boyfriend when Susanna was 14.

I sat down with Susanna on the porch outside of the Institute's Café and talked with her for a while about her memoir and writing in general. Susanna's father and grandfather's, and stepmother all wrote memoirs, and she told me that she started writing at 11, with a diary which she maintained for over a decade. "I've always looked at the world through writing," she told me with a smile.

Susanna's earned money as a writer since college and in the last five years, she's been able to make her living that way. Regarding her memoir, which I will read soon (Omega's bookstore had sold-out all copies of it by the time I came along), she said, "the construction of "I" is where I trust my voice."

People come to write memoirs from different starting points. The focus of Susanna's was clear from the time she woke up at 4 AM one day and saw the book in her mind. Shortly afterward, in response to an article that she published in Elle Magazine, four agents contacted her asking if she was working on a book. From there things went quickly, so quickly that she is embarrassed to say. But as she pointed out, Susanna had been writing for 25 years before she sold her memoir.

I also sat in on a workshop that Susanna ran for about 15 people. Unfortunately, although Susanna, for obvious reasons, has had issues of trust and betrayal, even though I had interviewed her, I did not make clear that I was attending the workshop as a journalist rather than as a participant. When I mentioned the prime reason for my presence at the workshop, everybody, including me, became upset. We straightened things out. But never underestimate the ability of a self-centered male to screw things up.

From a public reading at the end of the whole program, we all got a sense of what an extraordinarily fine writer Susanna is. In addition, during her workshop session, she demonstrated a wonderful sensitivity to other writers, crucial to being an excellent teacher which she is. "Write something you've never written before," she told the group. "I won't ask you to read it aloud. Don't worry." And we all followed suit. I wrote about THE most embarrassing moment in my life, but did so in a way that I realized that after revision it might even be publishable without giving me the embarrassment that would truly make me jump off a cliff.

Matthew Shepard's mother's memoir: recalling a brutal killing

2010-06-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

The 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard because he was gay, shocked the world. The image of his body tied to a fence carried over into at least one TV show, Bones. But like other world headline making crimes such as the 1985 killing of Leon Klinghoffer who was thrown overboard in 1985 from the Achille Lauro, or the 2002 decapitation of reporter Daniel Pearl, with time it has receded from many people's memories.

Publication of Judy Shepard's (Matthew's mother) memoir, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed (Hudson Street Press, 2009) casts the young man's murder in a light that I suspect may burn it and its significance deeper into readers' psyches. Put simply, Matthew, victim of a horrendous crime, was also someone's son. For sure there are parents with hearts so hardened from homophobia that they cannot sympathize. But I suspect and hope that they are a tiny percentage of the American population.

I believe that any parent who reads Judy Shepard's slow starting book will come away from the experience a bit changed. With no intention to compare homophobic killings to the immensity of the Holocaust, I suggest that just as Anne Frank's diary was the first book to put a single victim's face on the Holocaust, Shepard's puts one on the continuing epidemic of hate towards gays.
Although The Meaning of Matthew should probably be read with a supply of tissues on hand, it is much more than a tearjerker. We learn that long before Matthew outed himself to his mother - a difficult step for him - he asked her not to tell his father -she suspected he was gay and worried that he would never have a family of his own. In addition, Matthew was not street smart and at the age of 18 or so, he was raped one night while abroad with some classmates, by a group of three men. The incident left him with post traumatic syndrome which appears to have left a permanent mark on him.

Matthew' s difficulties with his identity also extended beyond the difficulty he had revealing his secrets to his father. He told two of his grandparents who seemed fine with the revelation, until his grandmother was asked if she would be willing to meet Matthews gay friends; she flunked the test by refusing.
Judy Shepard first learned about the circumstances of her son's death when, returning to the US from Saudi Arabia where her husband had been working, she saw a New York Times headline in airport kiosk. Summoned home for an unspecified emergency concerning Matthew, it was only in the hospital that the Shepards learn how serious things were. There they found him unconscious, his face and skull having been smashed in.

One of the unexpected consequences of what quickly become an event of worldwide significance, was a sympathy call from President Clinton. Initially Matthew's father refused to take it, fearing Clinton was trying to gain some political capital by calling. This was the first sign of things to come.
After Matthew's death, the family had to deal with the memorial service they arranged for him becoming a media event; CNN wanted to film the entire service. Even worse, a fanatical Christian group calling itself the Westboro Baptist Church, which travels the country protesting Gay pride events, picketed outside the church and later outside the courthouse when Matthew's killers were tried. "God hates fags," read one of their picket signs. With all the media storm created by the murder and the memorial service, the police even had Matthew's father wear a bulletproof vest he made a statement to the press.

In the aftermath of Matthew's death, Judy Shepard established a Matthew Shepard foundation devoted to fostering respect for other people, especially non-heterosexuals. Sheppard mentions that repeatedly Republicans have blocked adoption of a hate crime bill. She also briefly blasts the Catholic Church because Roman Catholic priests and the Newman Center tried to influence the jury and the outcome of the trial by persecuting the prosecutor of Matthew's killers.
Don't worry about the few moments in which you will need the tissues. In the end, The Meaning of Matthew is a reaffirmation of a mother's life and her love.

Memoir Festival July 16-18, 2010 - Rhinebeck, New York

2010-05-20T03:38:00.001-07:00

Omega is sponsoring what promises to be a terrific memoir festival. I'm going. Meet me there!

Below is the URL:

Howard

http://eomega.org/omega/workshops/458ca10c5a87cb22553ba80b1633938f/?content=LNK&source=WEB.OM.HB&subject=CF

Faculty

Nick Flynn is the author of a new book, The Ticking is the Bomb, which comes on the heels of his first stunning memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of a PEN/Martha Albrand Award. (Nick Flynn will not be in attendance Friday evening.) nickflynn.org
Malachy McCourt, an actor, singer and raconteur, is as moving and entertaining in real life as he is in many books, including the best-selling, highly acclaimed memoir, A Monk Swimming.
Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death, has published essays in Elle, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Parenting. susannasonnenberg.com
Alphie McCourt is the author of A Long Stone’s Throw. The youngest of the famed McCourt brothers, he has written for the Washington Post, The Villager, the Limerick Leader, and Icons magazine.
Darcey Steinke is the author of Easter Everywhere, as well as several novels. Her writing has appeared in Spin, Art Forum, The Guardian magazine, and the Village Voice, and she teaches at Columbia University, the New School, and Goddard College.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of When Skateboards Will Be Free, as well stories and essays for The Paris Review, Granta, and Open City. sayrafiezadeh.com
Fred Poole is the founder of Authentic Writing and the author of Authentic Writing: A Memoir on Creating Memoir. authenticwriting.com
Marta Szabo is codirector of Authentic Writing and author of the The Guru Looked Good. She writes for the blog, Mostly Memoir, and posts her writing regularly online at Experiments in Memoir. authenticwriting.com
James Kullander is a program developer and editor at Omega, as well as a freelance writer. His acclaimed essay, “My Martial Status,” originally published in The Sun magazine, was anthologized in The Best Buddhist Writing 2008.jameskullander.com

What’s So Funny About Borscht, Anyway?

2010-04-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

What’s So Funny About Borsht, Anyway?

review by Monique Paturel
Just finished Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, an entertaining account of her time back in the fold of her Mennonite family. She begins with three events that had the collective power to send her home.

      The first crisis involved a botched radical hysterectomy with the surgeon “accidentally punch[ing] a hole in two of [her] organs” leaving her incontinent, with husband Nick responsible for her care. The second crisis was a car accident a few months later involving a drunk driver. Broken bones and bruises she rolls around the house in casts in an office chair with one arm immobilized. Where’s Nick? Packing up to leave for his new lover Bob, whom he met on Gay.com. That would be the third crisis. What a crappy week. Rhoda gathers herself up and goes home to California, back to her Mennonite family and roots.

      Janzen’s mother is a woman comfortable in her skin. Down-home goodness and honesty make the perfect foil for her daughter, who has spent too much time in an abusive marriage forgetting what authenticity looks like. Her father, frugal and handsome, is the model patriarch. Together they seem to remind Rhoda of everything she hated about her childhood.

      Jansen’s resentment of the Mennonite culture creeps quietly through the book. Her humor is gratuitously mean-spirited at times. Her brothers, who continue to embrace the Mennonite lifestyle, marry and have children within the community. Why she is surprised that they don’t want to talk politics or beliefs with her is perplexing. Staying off uncommon ground seems a sensible strategy given their divergent lifestyles and history of theological boxing matches. Her sarcasm toward the sisters-in-law whose tastes and lifestyles are ridiculed made me cringe. This went nowhere, wasn’t that funny, and sounded bitchy. But she’s hard on herself too, with self-disapproval swathed in humor accompanying us throughout the book.

      Even with the helpful primer in the back, I came away not really understanding the Mennonites as an ethnic religious community. Bits of tradition, mostly in food form, are on each page, but I never got the gestalt of the culture. The food bits were fun though. The image of a cabbagey bowl of borscht being opened in an elementary school cafeteria filled me with dread on her behalf. Surely kids have been tortured for less.

      This review sounds like a pan, but I actually enjoyed reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Janzen is a funny and concise writer. (Though her vocabulary often overshoots the crowd.) While memoirs are typically based on memory, this book has the added strand of writing about her experiences in real time. There was something I liked about distant memory, recent memory, and yesterday playing off one another.

      As the extent of Nick’s abuse and mental illness are exposed, we begin to understand that Janzen’s coming home to heal had less to do with recent events and all to do with her 15 years with a man who took advantage of her early training at subservience. With time she begins to soften and allow herself to remember that the faith and kindness of her past is not her enemy. That’s when she truly arrives home.

memoir session at forthcoming NYC writers conference

2010-04-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.mmm.edu/cgi-bin/MySQLdb?MYSQL_VIEW=/news/view_event.txt&newsid=537

Writers' Conference 2007 (for a full description of the conference copy the above URL and paste it in your browser. To read about just the memoir session, scroll below)

June 7, 2007

Described as “the best one-day writers’ conference in the land,” over 70 distinguished authors, agents and publicists will discuss how to succeed in the literary world. Cynthia Ozick and Sara Nelson, Editor-in-Chief of Publisher’s Weekly, will serve as keynote speakers. Joining them will be a who’s who of literature, from Mary Higgins Clark to Claire Messud. As always, there will also be a networking reception following the day’s discussion panels.

When: Thursday, June 7, 8:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Where: Marymount Manhattan College (221 E. 71st Street, NYC)

Cost: $175 if registered before June 1, $195 afterwards. Lunch and reception included.

Register now! Call (212) 774-4810.

Special rate if you register for Conference and Writing Intensives at the same time! Total cost is $525 before June 1, $585 afterwards.

11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. SESSION II

Memoir
Moderator: Sidney Offit – Author, Memoir of the Bookie’s Son
Panelists: Debby Applegate – Author, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Sir Harold Evans – Former Editor, The Sunday Times, Random House; Author, The American Century
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt – Author, Me and DiMaggio: A Baseball Fan Goes in Search of His Gods
Daphne Merkin – Contributing Writer, The NY Times Magazine and Author of Enchantment: A Novel
Patricia Volk – Author, White Light, All It Takes, and The Yellow Banana
Carole O'Malley Gaunt - Author, Hungry Hill: A Memoir

Some New Memoir Titles

2010-04-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Allison, Jane. The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir. Mariner, 2010.
Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.
Blodgett, Bonnie. Remembering Smell:A Memoir of Losing Discovering- the Primal Sense. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
Butturini, Paula. Keeping the Feast: One Couples Story Love, Food and Healing in Italy, Riverhead Books, 2010.
Pfeiffer, Jules. Backing Into Forward:A Memoir. Nan A. Talese, 2010.
Hastings, Michael. I Lost My Love in Baghdad:A Modern War Story. Scribner, 2010.
Kerman, Piper.Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. Spiegel and Grau, 2010.
Koterba, Geoffrey. Inklings: A Memoir. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Making Babies

2010-04-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

"Happy Birthday Sweetie. How are you?" a parent tells his/her daughter who has just turned thirty something. Daughter responds with "I want to have a baby." It's a common scenario. Behind the young woman's statement is the ticking of her biological clock. Like millions of other young women in their 30s in postindustrial America, including the three authors of Three Wishes, she has put career on the front burner, ahead of marriage and motherhood. But like Pam Ferdinand, one of the three authors of Three Wishes, they all share some version of Ferdinand's dream in her early 20s: "I had imagined myself in the future as a married mother with five children living on a farm in Vermont."

Journalists Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Ferdinand (GJF) have written a revealing and well integrated account of their respective journeys from being single successful professionals to married successful mothers -- and professionals. Along the way to their longed for destinations, they had to navigate a bunch of difficult shoals -- including kissing a bunch of frogs (if I may mix my metaphors).

Author Goldberg decided to try IVF at age 39 after she broke up with a cheating
boyfriend. Sometime after she successfully convinced a new one to become a father to a child, they broke up, she had the baby and then became involved with a third somewhat older fellow who said about Goldberg's daughter, "I don't love her yet, but I'm sure I will love her. That relationship too collapsed.

Jones conceived with her husband who reacted to the news of her pregnancy by saying, "This isn't the most convenient time," Then she miscarried, divorced and had an unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend (who had a track record of numerous short-term relationships). "We'll figure this out," he said when she told him she was pregnant. "You just have to give me a little time." Then came a phone call from a genetic counselor, "I have your amnio results. . . . Beth, I'm sorry," and she aborted a Down Syndrome fetus. At one point, Goldberg gave her a vial of sperm that Goldberg had received from a sperm bank (which in the end neither of them needed.) The story goes on from there.

Ferdinand too took a while before she reached the promised land. For a while she was busy with a creep who described some vacation plans at one point, "come over with me and spend the first five days there. Then the guys [will] come [and you'll go home.] She too received the magic vial which in turn -- well, read the book.
In addition to the above problems, GJF also experience the threat of infertility and fear of familial rejection if they chose to use IVF.

One of several delightful features of Three Wishes is that it has some of the attributes of a mystery. The reader quickly becomes involved in their lives and determination to become pregnant. But this time the mystery is not who done it -- but who (as in which guy) will it ("it" as in get the woman pregnant)? And who will stick around?

For many women in GJF's predicament the ending is not a happy one. Many don't or can't take the chance of becoming single mothers. But for GJF themselves, it all works out in the end: children and husbands/fathers. Did I give away the ending? Don't worry. The book's mystery is in the process much more than in the ending(s).
Three Wishes inspires the reader to empathize with the authors' quest for parenthood and even cheer them on. One more thing -- although it might sound like a "woman's book," its scope is too big and too compelling for such narrow categorization. The book deserves a broad readership.

a tale of Zimbabwe

2010-03-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Has author Douglas Rogers increased the dangers facing his parents from Zimbabwe's Mugabe regime by writing about them in his compelling and remarkable book, The Last Resort? Given Rogers obvious intelligence, street smarts and first-hand familiarity with their situation, probably not. More likely the fame he has probably given them acts as a protective shield around the brave couple.

On one level, the subject of The Last Resort is Rogers's family. But the author, ordinarily a travel writer, has written one of those fascinating memoirs that tell a broad story that goes beyond what it looks like at first. Want to better understand what's going on in crazy Pres. Robert Mugabe was Zimbabwe, read Roger's book.

In many ways, the Rogers family symbolizes the experience of a large number of white farmers whose families settled long ago in the former Rhodesia. Despite how the repressive regime portrays its policy of appropriating white owned farms as land reform, that is not at all what it is. It's theft pure and simple which is not even benefiting the poor people. It is not at all simply a matter of white versus black. Most of the victims of Mugabe's repressive policies are black Africans who support his political opposition. True the Rogers were born into privilege, but they long ago accepted and perhaps even embraced black African rule.

When Mugabe first began his crackdown on Zimbabwe's white farmers, Rogers called his parents from the UK where he was then living.

"What's going on?" He asked his mother when she picked up the phone.

"Oh it's terrible, terrible!"

"What's happened?" He asked, his heart in his mouth.

"They lost."

"Who lost?"

"Why the cricket team."

It wasn't that Rogers' mother was unaware of what was going on. But she kept her perspective. As it happened, initially the Rogers got a pass from the appropriation policy; they own a resort, not a farm. But that didn't stop gangs of young toughs from riding up to their front door waving weapons in the air. In addition, through entirely extralegal manipulation, at one point Rogers' father finds out that his lost legal title to his land. But still they hang on.

Gradually, the Rogers' resort, having lost its tourist customers, metamorphized with part of it serving as a haven initially for white Zimbabweans who were forced off their land and part of it as a bar which attracted people from the nearest city. In addition, for part of the time some of the land was sublet by a man who ran what amounted to a bordello.

Along with plenty of scenes of high tension, Rogers provides a number of comic scenes in a gripping writing style that deserves a wide readership.

A Horse Story

2010-03-15T17:14:00.001-07:00

The human experience is such that some people carve their own paths out of misery. In the case of Susan Richards, author of Saddled: How a Spirited Horse Reined Me in and Set Me Free, her way out of the alcoholism that threatened to destroy her was to love and care for a horse. Only several years after she stopped drinking did she join Alcoholics Anonymous.

Richards' drinking followed a disastrous childhood. A number of people in her family were alcoholics, her mother died when she was young, and soon afterward, her father abandoned her and her brother, leaving them unattended and alone. Only after three terrifying days did her grandmother’s chauffeur come and take the children to her house. Afterwards, Richards was shuffled around from one unloving relative to another.

Reading Saddled, I wondered about Richards’ focus on a horse and her penchant for divining what the horse thinks. I was reminded of the Tom Hank’s film, Castaway. In the film, a plane crash survivor on a small deserted island developed a dependency on “Wilson” a volleyball that also washed ashore, that the Hank’s character anthropomorphized, and on which he painted a face. I suggest that this strange relationship somewhat parallels that of Richards and her horse. In both cases, desperate people reach out to find a way out of their loneliness.

Part of the reason for the success of books like Richards’ (and films like Castaway) is how they plumb the depths of a condition that few of us can completely avoid. This is the secret of Wizard of Oz, in which a wicked witch and her simian minions threaten poor Dorothy to her very core. In Richards’ case, the villains include her mean grandmother, the grandmother’s vicious chauffeur, Richards’ second husband and a two-timing boy friend. Both Dorothy and Richards want to “go home” to a secure place.

There is a big difference between Richards and Dorothy, of course. Richards is an adult who must bear responsibility for her actions as a grown up; Dorothy is a fictional child.

This reviewer was tested by Richards’ claim to divine the thoughts of her horse. “There couldn’t have been any doubt in her mind that whatever her status had been for the past year, here she was a celebrity,” Richardson tells the reader at one point. Really?

Richards’ odd claim notwithstanding, she does a fine job of tracing her metamorphosis from abandoned child to abused alcoholic adult to a largely healed person who has resolved many of the problems that plagued her for decades. In the end she became a certified social worker who gained the self-knowledge that she lacked in her earlier years.

Richards tells her story using finely and thoroughly wrought (though sometimes repetitive) scenes, many of which beautifully describe a horse in action. An earlier Richards book, Chosen by a Horse, was a NY Times best seller and despite some of the book’s flaws, Saddle, too could achieve that success. It has a ready audience among the multitude devotees of animal-themed books. In addition, Saddled will also please readers who just want a well-told story of human redemption.

A white Zimbabwean couple holding out against Mugabe

2010-02-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

My current reads include: Douglas Rogers fascinating The Last Resort about his and his parents' lives in Zimbabwe. Doug lives in Brooklyn now - has lived in South Africa and the UK before - But his parents still live on the land that they bought decades ago - and they're holding their own against the drive to push all whites out of the country in which they - and their children - were born.

This is one of those books that's really difficult to put down.

2010-02-20T09:46:00.001-08:00

Woodstock Writers Festival: Paula Butturini -- Healing through Food

2010-02-19T06:09:00.001-08:00

"If you don't stop walking like Frankenstein, I'm going to punch you," Paula Butturini recalled screaming at her husband toward the end of his recuperation from a bullet wound. They were in Rome. Butturini added that nobody noticed, at which the audience laughed, at her slightly veiled comment about the volume at which Italians speak.

Her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was reporting from Romania at the time that the country was in the process of overthrowing its communist regime, when a bullet almost cost him his life. At the time when she made her angry statement, he was still walking with a brace, but his progress in healing had seemed to come to a halt and he had become immersed in depression. "The accident was a defining moment and things start to turn after that," Butturini recalled, adding, "Sometimes anger can be a virtue."

Butturini's new book, Keeping the Feast has just come out. In fact just an hour ago from this time as I sit here composing this posting, the mailman handed me a copy of it. I heard Butturini speak on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival. I was a little tempted to delay writing about her until I read the book. But at 260 pages it looks like a quick dash and interesting -- read. I'll post again after I finished it.

Butturini's book is subtitled, "One couple's story of love food and healing in Italy." She and Tagliabue met in Rome in 1985, married four years later, just a month before he was shot. Subsequently he suffered post traumatic stress and fell into a severe depression. Butturini was no stranger to this latter phenomenon; her mother had suffered from it when the author was a child and she was not going to tolerate her husband putting her through the experienced a second time.

Butturini did more than just demand that her husband not give into depression. As part of his therapy, while living in Rome she established some simple rituals of daily life, shopping for foods in Rome's outdoor market and preparing delicious meals which unlike so many couples and families they sat down and shared. Too many people use food as consolation -- and pay for it on the scales. Butturini used food for healing. It worked.

Healing through Food

2010-02-19T06:08:00.001-08:00

"If you don't stop walking like Frankenstein, I'm going to punch you," Paula Butturini recalled screaming at her husband toward the end of his recuperation from a bullet wound. They were in Rome. Butturini added that nobody noticed, at which the audience laughed, at her slightly veiled comment about the volume at which Italians speak.

Her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was reporting from Romania at the time that the country was in the process of overthrowing its communist regime, when a bullet almost cost him his life. At the time when she made her angry statement, he was still walking with a brace, but his progress in healing had seemed to come to a halt and he had become immersed in depression. "The accident was a defining moment and things start to turn after that," Butturini recalled, adding, "Sometimes anger can be a virtue."

Butturini's new book, Keeping the Feast has just come out. In fact just an hour ago from this time as I sit here composing this posting, the mailman handed me a copy of it. I heard Butturini speak on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival. I was a little tempted to delay writing about her until I read the book. But at 260 pages it looks like a quick dash and interesting -- read. I'll post again after I finished it.

Butturini's book is subtitled, "One couple's story of love food and healing in Italy." She and Tagliabue met in Rome in 1985, married four years later, just a month before he was shot. Subsequently he suffered post traumatic stress and fell into a severe depression. Butturini was no stranger to this latter phenomenon; her mother had suffered from it when the author was a child and she was not going to tolerate her husband putting her through the experienced a second time.

Butturini did more than just demand that her husband not give into depression. As part of his therapy, while living in Rome she established some simple rituals of daily life, shopping for foods in Rome's outdoor market and preparing delicious meals which unlike so many couples and families they sat down and shared. Too many people use food as consolation -- and pay for it on the scales. Butturini used food for healing. It worked.

Howard Blue

2010-02-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

Nikita Khrushchev -- memoir

2010-02-18T15:11:00.000-08:00

Last November I interviewed Sergei Khrushchev regarding his memoir about his father. I have yet to post the video from the interview. Alas, a modern-day book reviewer on the net has to master website, twitter, blog, Facebook and YouTube technology. Slowly, gradually, I'll get to it.

At one point I asked Dr. Khrushchev what prompted him to emigrate. "I didn't emigrate," he replied. I came for a job."

"But you have American citizenship, don't you?" I said.

"Yes I do," he said, "but I still have my Russian citizenship, I have an apartment in Moscow and I go there regularly."

In 1991, 1992 and 1993 when I make several visits to Moscow and I witnessed the coup which resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, I hoped that many more people would have a lifestyle that reflected not only the end of the Cold War, but also the development of a real peace throughout the world. Well you know the rest of the story.

Memoirs on Mormonism (The Church of Latter-day Saints)

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Beck, Martha. Leaving the Saints. By daughter of Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley. Crown, 2005.

Jeffs,Brent W. Lost Boy. Broadway 2009. On sexual abuse author experienced as a child & his related lawsuit.

Geer, Thelma. Mormonism, Mama and Me. Moody Publishing, 1986.

Jessup, Carolyn. Escape. Broadway, 2007. By a former polygamist.

Laake, Deborah. Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond. Morrow, 1993.

McCreary, Pamela. Dancing on the Head of A Pin. Ghost Road Press, 2010.

Morin, Brad L. and Morin, Chris. Suddenly Strangers: Surrendering God's and Heroes. Aventine Press, 2004. Two brothers leave the Mormon church.

Pearson, Carol Lynn. Goodbye, I Love You. Cedar Fort, 2006. Mormon woman married to gay man.

Robertson, Judy. Out of Mormonism:A Woman's True Story. Bethany House, 2001.Irene.

Schmidt, Susan Ray. Favorite Wife:Escape from Polygamy. The Lyons Press. author describes her marriage to a Mormon cult leader at age 15, and her escape from the oppression her married life entailed.

Spencer, Irene Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist Wife. Center Street, 2008.

Spencer, James R. Beyond Mormonism: An Elder's Story. A convert to Mormonism leaves it to become a minister in a non-Mormon church.

Wall, Elissa. Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs. William Morrow, 2008.

Worthy, Jack B. The Mormon Cult: A Former Missionary Reveals the Secrets of Mormon Mind Control. See Sharp Press, 2008

the Woodstock Writers Festival: Dani Shapiro

2010-02-17T10:55:00.000-08:00

I heard Dani Shapiro, the author of five novels and two memoirs, Slow Motion and Devotion. when she appeared on a panel with three other memoirists on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival, in the Bearsville Theatre, about 2 miles from the center of town. Dani is also a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University.
The first person on her panel to speak, Shalom Auslander (Foreskin's Lament), an intensely funny and acerbic writer initially threatened to steal the show with humorous remarks that left the whole audience and his fellow panelists cracking up. But Auslander's fellow panelists, Shapiro among them, quickly showed that they were going to hold their own.
At first glance, Shapiro, 47, looks younger than her years, except for a profound seriousness and pensiveness that is at odds with that first impression. She was raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish home, although it was her father who was Orthodox; her mother was an atheist. At age 23 Shapiro found herself a college dropout with a cocaine habit, mistress to her best friend's wealthy stepfather. Then, one day a car accident left both her parents in critical condition and she took on the responsibility of caring for them. One consequence of the experience was that Shapiro wound up rebuilding her life, returning to both college and her Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

The above paragraph outlines the content of Slow Motion which came out in 1998. But at this panel discussion, Shapiro spoke about Devotion, her latest book, which came out less than a month ago. Devotion was inspired by a series of questions about religion and mortality that her son asked. Determined to try to find him -- and herself -- some good answers, Shapiro set out with the help of religious leaders of several different faiths to seek the answers to some of the basic questions that confound us all.

Shapiro had some of the problems that characterize relationships between many of us and our parents. At one point, she commented to the audience, a therapist told her and her mother, "I don't think there's any hope for the two of you," meaning apparently that their relationship was beyond repair. But judging from Shapiro's remarks and several reviews of her book, she has walked much more than the extra mile toward becoming a decent adult, mother and spouse and a profoundly respected writer and writing teacher.

Woodstock Writers Festival: Douglas Rogers

2010-02-16T19:39:00.001-08:00

I sat down this afternoon and tried to start a piece about a fantastic weekend I spent at the Woodstock Writers Festival which was devoted to memoir. At least today, I found it too difficult to try to put together an account of so many disparate parts of the weekend experience. But I will mention that a fascinating and hard-working group of people created the festival which about 400 people attended. One of the organizers was Martha Frankel, the festival's executive director and a very successful author, about whom I will write in another posting as I plan too to write about her festival planning colleagues.

For now I'm going to just tell you about one of the most interesting writers I heard. His name is Douglas Rogers and he was born in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was known then). He's also a good-looking fair-haired, travel writer with a look on his face that says "Nothing surprises me. I've seen a lot of things in my life and I'm not going to get very upset no matter what anyone says or does." Douglas has lived around here and there, some 50 countries according to his count. He now calls Brooklyn his home.

As Douglas explains, I’m attracted to stories of ordinary people living brave, strange, imaginative, or heroic lives." Well among those people are Douglas's own "European" parents, ("European" being the term used to refer to whites in southern Africa.) You may know that Zimbabwe is ruled by Robert Mugabe, the too long ruling, dictator whose policies have been condemned internationally.

According to Douglas, despite what may appear in the press, the main targets of Mugabe are his African opponents - not Zimbabwe's Europeans - although Mugabe has driven many, perhaps most of them, off their land and out of the country. Despite threats, including some from bands of armed teenagers who have driven up to Douglas's parents door in trucks, his folks, Lyn and Ros are not leaving. They own a chunk of land on which they run a resort. At one point when things really started to get difficult, Douglas called his parents from abroad. "How are things going Mom?" he asked worriedly. "Terribly Douglas, I'm terribly upset. They lost." "Who are THEY?" he asked even more upset, but also perplexed. "Why the cricket team, of course. Who do you think I meant?" his mother replied. Douglas's parents don't scare easily.

Douglas's book, The Last Resort is in part a coming of age tale as well as a "how to book," as in “how to survive in a corrupt Third World dictatorship.” Included in the story is the fact that there is a brothel on his parents' land, and some marijuana seems to be growing there too. Huh? I'll be reviewing the book at some point in the coming weeks.

disappearance & then resurgence of a cultural legacy

2010-02-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

In An Orphan in History, author Paul Cowan describes how his family's Jewish religious and cultural legacy evaporated and how he then set out to reconstitute them.

The author's life after her parents drowned

2010-02-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

My next read, Judith Barrington's Lifesaving: A Memoir, about her three years living in Spain after the drowning deaths of her parents after the cruise ship they were on caught fire.

Ursula Le Guin talks about Barrington's beautiful honesty in her review of the book.

The Longest Trip Home

2010-02-10T10:09:00.003-08:00

How religion impacts on our lives has always been a subject of fascination to me. John Grogan, author of The Longest Trip Home (and of an earlier best-selling memoir, Marley and Me), does a fine job of showing how his parents extreme brand of Catholicism impacted on his childhood. For one thing, the family vacations were not to amusement parks or national monuments. Instead, they visited shrines and other holy sites. On one such visit his parents let their children and climbing the 28 steps to a basilica in Canada on their knees!

Some of Grogan's accounts of childhood and adolescent hijinks, and other events, seem a bit too humdrum. But the book's last hundred pages from which its title was drawn, are much more than redeeming. This section recount the author's relationship with his parents, primarily his father, in their declining days including during the last weeks of his father's life. Anyone - and that's most of us - who has seen the physical decline and death of a loved one, will appreciate Grogan's sensitive account of his experience.

The Longest Trip Home

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2010-02-09T17:10:00.000-08:00

An American Rebel in Cuba & A Boy Soldier in Sierra Leone

2010-02-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

Two books, A Rebel in Cuba by Neill Macaulay and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, both reveal what is best about memoirs, the exposition of personal perspective gained from personal experience.

Both Macaulay and Beah present vivid accounts of their experiences in war. As a young man, Macaulay was an American member of the guerrilla movement that overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958; Beah as a 12-year-old, was sucked into the haphazard army of Sierra Leone which shared the cruelty of the rebel forces that marauded the West African nation's backcountry.

After Beah witnessed and participated in a number of cruelties, two UNICEF workers found him, and took him and fourteen other boy soldiers to a facility to bring them back to normalcy. But almost as bad as the adults responsible for pulling the young boys into war betrayed their responsibility as adults to protect the young, the UNICEF people foolishly mixed in boys from both groups. The resulting violence that broke out in the facility brought about the deaths of six boys and injuries to a number of others. In addition, after months of being allowed to act on impulse, the boys even attacked staff members who were trying to help them.

One reviewer has called Beah's book "one of the most important war stories of our generation," I heartily agree. It is a seamlessly written account which reveals how far humans have devolved from the supposedly "more civilized warfare" when European men stood on fields in the 18th century and took aim at each other in a gentlemanly manner. In one scene, older soldiers prompted the author and several other boys to participate in a contest: each was to kill a prisoner. The boy whose prisoner died first was the winner.

A Rebel in Cuba, originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1999, is almost as equally compelling as Beah's book. As a 23-year-old who had just completed a tour of duty in the U.S. Army in South Korea, the author, a graduate of the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, was looking for adventure. He found it by joining the Fidel Castro's guerillas in the mountains of Cuba's Pinar Del Rio Province where he fought for one year.

Macaulay's account of the shooting of prisoners is less shocking than Beah's. But the arbitrary decisions that determined which people would be executed are still extremely unsettling to read about. In Beah's experience, the decisions were totally random ones based sometimes on whether the unit commander or a soldier did or did not like the look on a captive's face

In Macaulay's experience, although informers were dead men walking, the guerrillas decision whether or not to execute known supporters of Batista would have not necessarily informed on the guerrillas, hinged on whether at a given moment someone thought that killing such a person would aid or hurt the rebel cause.

In addition to his vivid portrait of the lives of the guerrillas in the mountains and the mindset of his fellow guerrillas, Macaulay also provides a fascinating account of the divisions among the anti-government groups. Not surprisingly, Batista's urban opponents were seeking less radical change than the guerrillas in the mountains who came from landless and destitute peasant families.

Both books are wonderfully antidotal to the Eurocentric and US centric reporting to which Americans are constantly subject. That some Americans refer to the "country" of Africa illustrates this. The bias of American news media is no better illustrated than Macauley's account of hearing a report from CBS on New Year's Eve 1958 which all but claimed that Batista's forces were on the verge of annihilating their opponents. The next morning Coley woke up to news that Batista had fled Cuba!

McCaulay did not remain in on unqualified supporter of Castro. The world really is made up mostly of shades of gray; he became disillusioned with the infringements on personal liberties in Cuba experienced after Castro came to power. But A Rebel in Cuba is a classic example of the value of firsthand accounts. Reading a book like Macauley's makes one hunger to hear more Iraqi and Afghan perspectives on the wars in their land and more Chinese perspectives on the problems and complexity of their country.

On Becoming A Grandparent

2010-02-09T16:55:00.001-08:00

The perfect gift for new grandparents: On Becoming A Grandparent by Alma Bond.

Coming of Age memoirs

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The following list of coming of age memoirs supplements the titles you can find on http://www.memoirreviews.com

Please support our website and this blog by purchasing books. Just click on a title to see prices and reviews.

Alter, Stephen. All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas. South Asia Books, 1997.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time: A Memoir . Penguin, 1977.

DeSalvo, Louise and Giunta, Edvige. Vertigo: A Memoir . The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. Account of author’s harsh upbringing and her study of Virginia Woolf.

Friedman, Hannah. Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool . HCI Teens, 2009.

Froncek, Thomas. Home Again, Home Again: A Son's Memoir . Arcade Publishing, 1996. A son recounts his 1950’s childhood and relationship with his father.

McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood . Harvest Books, 1972.

McCarthy, Mary. How I Grew . Harvest Books, 2004.

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi . New York: Dial, 1968.

O'Connor, Sandra Day. Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest . Random House, 2003.

Rothschild, Matt. Dumbfounded: Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn't for Sissies . Three Rivers Press, 2008.

Rushfield, Richard. Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the 80s . Gotham, 2009.

Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames . Little, Brown and Co., 2008. By the humorist.

Wilson, John V. Jr. Meridian Street: An Illustrated Memoir . Outskirts Press, 2006. On growing up during the Great Depression and going on to a career in Washington.

Wolff, Geoffrey. The Edge of Maine . National Geographic, 2005. Novelist/biographer spends many summers in Maine.

growing up in the Soviet Union

2010-02-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir . . . could be taught as a master class in memoir writing," says reviewer Elena Lappin in the Feb. 7 NY Times book review section. One can't get a better recommendation.
I listened to a reading from the book by the author, Russian immigrant Elena Gorokhova last week at the University of Vermont. Elena's writing was poetic and her reading of various passages was delightful. The book describes growing up in Leningrad in the 1950s and 60s, dealing with so many aspects of a repressive society and falling in love with the English language which led eventually to Elena's emigrating.