Memoirs

I have read some really fascinating memiors in the last year or so, and almost all of them were by women.

The year of Magical Thinking was wonderful. I'd actually never read Joan Didion before, but I am quickly rectifying the situation. This was such a clear-eyed look at grief and the emotional reaction to sudden trauma and loss. I really appreciated seeing a book on the subject that doesn't describe the grieving process from the perspective of religion/spiritualism - that seems quite rare. I was so sorry to hear that her daughter passed away after the book was completed.

Most recently I read The Glass Castle and I really couldn't put it down. I really admire how she was able to describe her parents so lovingly without glossing over their many, many flaws. Like with Mary Karr (of The Liars Club and Cherry), her fairly catastrophic childhood produced a strong-willed and sharp-minded woman, with some tremendous writing ability!

In graphic novels, I really adore Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and I encourage everyone to check it out even if you don't normally read that sort of thing. It's very accessible for a general audience and tells a tragic family history with a lot of humor and acceptance.

One that I just finished recently is a charming book called Twelve Little Cakes which is the story of growing up under communism. The whole thing is written from a child's point of view so it's different than other perspectives of the same time period.

Others that I'd recommend would be Reading Lolita in Tehran, Leave me Alone, I'm Reading, and the Persepolis books by Marjane Satrapi. There's quite a bit of overlap among those three, being memoirs connected to books or about life in Iran, that I wasn't entirely aware of until I listed them all together like that. I actually got to meet Azar Nafisi when she spoke at my organization's meeting this year - she's a very interesting person.

I loved Fun Home. I've been raving about it to anyone who will listen.

If you liked Autobiography of Face, may I recommend Bee Lavender's Lessons in Taxidermy? She suffered from multiple forms of childhood cancer not only to survive, but grow up and raise a family.

I have in my "pile" Savage Beauty. I read an excerpt in Vanity Fair a few years ago when it came out. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Got to get around to reading the one about Anais Nin by Deirdre Bair!

I keep hearing good things about Joan Didion's book so I'm going to add it to my wishlist.

Some of my favorite female biographies/memoirs are Sleeping with Cats, Tales of a Female Nomad, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and anything by Helene Hanff.

Autobiography of a Face is in my to-read pile, along with Sickened. I will look for Lessons in Taxidermy as well, it looks great. It comes recommended by Michelle Tea and that's enough to sell me. (Valencia and The Chelsea Whistle are multiple reads for me).

Drugs are Nice is the kind of book that I'm really curious about but not sure I have the stomach for. Has anyone read that one?

I'd like to recommend without reservation Period Piece by Gwen Raverat. She was born into the extensive, eccentric and hypochondriacal Darwin family, and grew up in Cambridge in the 1880s and 1890s; the book is her memoir of her girlhood. It is very entertaining, beautifully written, and has her own delightful illustrations: the caption 'Aunt Etty ordering dinner in her patent anti-cold mask' gives the flavour!

I read a little more than half of Drugs Are Nice before I indefinitely shelved it. (I just noticed I must have removed the bookmark, or it fell out. A sure sign I'll never get back to it.)

I think she gets off a little too much on shock value, and believe me, I'm hard to shock.

I couldn't get into Year of Magical Thinking. I didn't hate it, it just didn't do it for me. Maybe I had too high of expectations.

I have really enjoyed The Glass Castle. It's one of my favorite memoirs. I also loved Jesus Land, Julie and Julia and Name all the Animals.

Hi Fiso,

Have you read Savage Beauty? I've read it twice! It has to be the most readable biography I've read in some time. There is the Millay Society that is restoring her house in upstate New York.

You can read more here
http://www.millaysociety.org/index.html

I picked up Zelda, also by Nancy Milford but haven't read it yet.

I also have the biography about Anais Nin and have browsed through it. I've read nearly all of her diaries and in their 'rose colored hues', find within them, the Anais I like best.

Cate

I don't tend to be attracted to memoirs generally but one of the memoirs I found very enlightening, very moving, was Speaking Truth to Power by Anita Hill. I listened to it on audio because she read her memoirs and I really felt I needed to hear her story in her voice.

Reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali currently.

Paula Fox's memoir Borrowed Finery is a sparely and beautifully written memoir of the writer's very difficult childhood, and without an ounce of sentimentality or self-pity. Her follow-up, The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe, about one of her earliest jobs is interesting, but not as compelling.

Unbowed by Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai is a very interesting story of a very brave woman.

Them by Francine du Plessix Gray, focuses on her very self-absorbed parents, who had both fascinating and difficult early lives in Europe, before and during World War II and the German occupation in France, and then led a glamorous life in NYC.

I don't read many memoirs, but I did enjoy Vera Brittain's classic World War I memoir Testament of Youth and, much more recently Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, about her unconventional childhood in Africa.

Anyone else read Lady Murasaki's memoirs? Just thought of that the other day as I was talking about nun books with a friend. Lady M was a courtesan who later became a Buddhist nun, if memory serves.

Finished Infidel, it's excellent. A woman's coming-of-age, coming into her own tale.

Finished another excellent African woman's memoir, Singing Away the Hunger, also very good.

And, I finished yet another excellent memoir by an African woman...Born in the Big Rains by Fadumo Korn. Like Ali, Korn is from Somalia so it was an interesting comparison.

I read Autobiography of a Face. Very sad. It was interesting that she never talked about any connection to her twin sister.

Anyone read Shutterbabe by Deborah Copaken Kogan? I thought it was really fun and interesting - she's a photojournalist in the midst of men.

Over the last couple of years I've been drawn to books, both fiction and non-fiction, about life in China and Japan. There are have been several that have really stood out for me:

Autobiography of a geisha by Sayo Masuda
Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki
Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Each of them were written by women, about women, and each is absolutely wonderful.

Here are some lighter memoirs by females, nothing to heavy.

Straight Up and Dirty by Stephanie Klein
Bitter is the new Black by Jen Lancaster
Bright Lights, Big Ass by Jen Lancaster
Hack by Melissa Plout - touchstones aren't loading, but it is about one of the only female cabbies in NYC.

I very much recommend Piece by Piece (that came up as Rhinoceros by Ionesco, wha?) by Tori Amos. Especially if you have a creative bent.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, the Italics are Mine by Nina Berberova, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam, My Half-Century by Anna Akhmatova and Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford. These are all memoirs by writers from other countries. They are all wonderful lwriters, and their memoirs are fascinating, but also quite tragic.

I read "Snowflower" and it kind of left me cold. Seemed incomplete.

Anybody want to speak to that?

I read Snowflower and the Secret Fan and loved it. Very painful, but I thought it was really timeless regarding friendships, relationships, misunderstandings...

Hmm. I loved The Glass Castle, Name All the Animals and Fun Home as well. Currently really enjoying Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup.

I just wanted to comment on The Glass Castle. I liked the book, she wrote an honest account. I have discussed this book with some that felt she went on and on over the same problems too much, but it went on and on for most of her life, so I do not object about how she told her story. The most amazing story within her memoir was about her time at college. That made me want to scream "Me too!!!!!!!!!" Not me too because I was ever homeless, rather I told something that I knew was the truth and had the professor knock it down and ask me what could "I" possibly know about the situation. Most people who have unusual life stories like her are so messed up they are the walking wounded. And you can see them a mile away. In this book I met a fellow survivor that grew a hard protective shell and was able to pull off the impossible of never letting anyone know. Of course there are other problems going to that extreme also. Anyway, she is my hero for telling her story.

Has anyone else felt a close connection to a memoir? It doesn't mean you have to have had a leg blown off or anything horrible. I wondered if anyone felt a connection with an author telling something about themselves that you never told anyone else about.

Now, yareader2, you don't expect people my age to start pulling off their hard protective shells and tell all, do you?

That said, I have to say that "A Room of One's Own" speaks to me more now than ever, though I can't say I ever put rocks in my pocket and walked into water over my head.

But I do understand the yearning to have more well-ordered and productive alone time.

Not sure where your prof was coming from, but as a prof I can tell you that I'm happy when students respond to books.

But if your prof is a good one and not just an egotistical git who enjoys humiliating students, he or she might also be trying to get you to be a more discriminating reader, able to weigh a book's aesthetic and intellectual value against those of other books.

Sometimes students say they really, really like a book because it relates to something in their lives. And have read and related, they just want to move on. They don't want to discuss details like word choice, structure, point of view, etc.

Just a thought.

dear nohrt4me,

Feel free to let your hair down and tell all! But I wasn't asking you to get out of your protective shell. I was looking for connections to books.

As for the prof, I am sure you are a very good one. The one I had was not asking about how I connected with a book, rather he asked how I could think I knew about an obscure topic? I backed right down like the author of Glass Castles did in her experience.

I hope this clears things up.

yare, yes I have had that experience. A ton of years ago, I was reading Margaret Atwood (I think it was in Edible Woman) when the girl in the ballet class had to dress up as a mothball rather than take on one of the beautiful other roles for the recital. She was so livid at having to play this "ugly" part that she stomped and chased after the butterflies with everything she had in her, in her mothball costume. This was so much like my fledgling role as a prima ballerina (I didn't even get to dance - I had to recite a poem), that I was lying on the floor howling with laughter and empathy when I read it. It was my first Atwood that I'd read and I felt a powerful connection with her from that point on. She caught that eight year old disappointment and frustration perfectly.

I recently finished The Abandoned Baobab by Ken Bugul, a Senegalese woman born in 1947 who struggles to find her place in the world. The afterward called it an autobiographical novel as apparently some of the narrative is fictional. It tells her 'prehistory' (a narrative not unlike traditional African folktales), her childhood in Senegal and her young adulthood as a student in Belgium. Apparently when the memoir first came out, it caused a stir because of the author's openness about all parts of her life including her sex life, prostitution and drug use. It was enlightening.

I just finished Socialism is Great! by Lijia Zhang a story of growing up in China during the 1980s after Mao has died and China is just beginning to open up to the world. Lijia has a lot of spunk, persistence, and honesty. She ends her tale in 1989 just after she has helped organize a protest with her fellow factory workers in Nanjing to support the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.