A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction (Sweetwater Fiction: Reintroductions) (edition 2004)

by Allan Seager (Author), Charles Baxter (Introduction)

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A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange." Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. "Time makes fiction out of our memories," writes Seager. "We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic---selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." A Frieze of Girls is Allan Seager at the top of his form, and a reminder that great writing always transcends mere fashion. Allan Seager was Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many highly praised short stories and novels, including Amos Berry. He died in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968. Novelist Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy.… (more)

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Member:	FolioLiterary
Title:	A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction (Sweetwater Fiction: Reintroductions)
Authors:	Allan Seager (Author)
Other authors:	Charles Baxter (Introduction)
Info:	UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGIONAL (2004), 264 pages
Collections:	Ober_Storage_Special_Collection
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A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction (Sweetwater Fiction: Reintroductions) by Allan Seager

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What a sense of humor! Wish he'd written another memoir. I've read that Seager was compared to or listed with other writers of his time, like Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Well those guys never made me laugh like Seager did in this beautifully crafted set of autobiographical pieces. This man knew enough about writing not to take himself too seriously, in spite of his bout with tuberculosis. People have called some of these essays heartbreaking, but I found them mostly hilarious. Being a Michigander/Midwesterner myself, I found much with which to identify while reading Seager. I've walked the U of M campus and recognize small-town Michigan in his descriptions of Adrian (his birthplace) and the stoic mannerisms of his family and friends. The style and the humor are so easy and conversational - so contemporary - that I often had to remind myself that these stories all happened in the 1920s! The only thing really heartbreaking here is that Allan Seager died so young. When I was a kid, if I heard about someone dying at 62, I just figured it was probably "old age." Now I'm 65, and I know better. Here was a life full of promise cut short. This book, A Frieze of Girls, deserves a wide readership, but, sadly, it probably will sink into obscurity again before long. I plan to tell as many people as possible about it. If I had to compare him to someone, it might be Ring Lardner or Andy Rooney. This guy was funny! And he could write like nobody's business. (

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TimBazzett | Apr 26, 2009 |

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A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange." Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. "Time makes fiction out of our memories," writes Seager. "We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic---selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." A Frieze of Girls is Allan Seager at the top of his form, and a reminder that great writing always transcends mere fashion. Allan Seager was Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many highly praised short stories and novels, including Amos Berry. He died in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968. Novelist Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy.

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