When Joan Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne dropped dead on December 30, 2003, he was in the middle of a speaking a sentence in their living room. She was mixing a salad for their dinner.

As I write these words, Stuart and I are about to sit down to eat the dinner the two of us have prepared together. He mixed the salad as I made the dressing.  He showed me how to extract a single frozen bratwurst from a package of six and then quartered the potatoes. I snipped the yellow wax beans and threw in the squash.

John Dunne edited everything Joan Didion ever published and vice versa. Ditto for Stuart and me.

Dunne and Didion were about to celebrate 40 years of marriage when he died. For Stuart and me, the celebration took place a week ago.  Joan Didion’s memoir was on the bedstand the night of our own 40th anniversary.

I think you can see why I identified with Didion in this book–and why that identification is a little terrifying. While I am no more Joan Didion than Dan Quayle was John F. Kennedy, I do share a few of her traits. Her type of marriage holds similarities to mine, and I recognize also her instinct to put her life on the page to look at it from different angles and understood in new ways. What she has lost, I may someday lose also, and therein lies the terror.

The greatest value of this book is that it helps the reader confront the terrible, oft-repressed, subject of death. The book will help the dying (all of us someday!) and the grieving alike.  Didion abhors both self-help writing and writing-as-therapy. She is much more intent on telling the truth than at simplifying it in order to be helpful to others.

Ironically, because of her focus on describing the exact condition of her mind and body, weaving memory with reporting, the personal and the learned, she helps her readers more than many other writers whose first goal is bringing comfort to the bereaved. All great literature is a form of self-help. We turn to it–think of  the Psalms or Shakespeare–when we reach our limits  or want to express our joy. This book, too, achieves that kind of stature. As John Leonard said in The New York Review of Books, “I can’t imagine dying without [it].”

The Year of Magical Thinking is about sudden death and its impact. Not only does Didion lose her husband, but her only child, her daughter, Quintana Roo, goes through two critical health crises in hospitals on both coasts, once before her father’s death and once afterward. By the time this book was published in 2005, Quintana had died also, although Didion chose not to rewrite the book to include this fact.

How much suffering can one person take? And what effect does suffering all the way to the bone have on the mind and body? Didion answered these questions as she pounded out the book in 88 days in the latter months of 2004. The book ultimately won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Didion begins with these words:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Even though the lines look like poetry, their power lies from extreme understatement, from the prosaic within the tragic.  Didion rejects anything dramatic, easy or sentimental, and tests her humanist-Episcopalian worldview. Will she be able to bear the weight of all this loss even though she doesn’t believe God is taking a personal interest in it? Her last sentence declares that “no eye is on the sparrow”; she extracts her strength from memory, endurance, science, and art. But she also comes back many times to the rich language of The Book of Common Prayer and to the service for John at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Like the new journalist pioneer she is, Didion researches death to try to understand it better and then tells the reader facts she gleans. The book is a compendium of other works, both literary and scientific, on the subject of death and grief. Yet it is not displayed in linear thought patterns. Instead it is digested and shared in fragments, so that we can understand the subject of the book–magical thinking–the kind of thinking that invades the mind of this fierce intellectual as she endures a devastating period of her life. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends, she repeats many times. She cannot give away John’s shoes–and then she recognizes why–he will need them when he comes back.

Another aspect of magical thinking is reviewing the entire marriage for signs of how it will end. My favorite passage occurs two-thirds of the way through the book as Didion recalls her birthday, which occurred 25 days before John’s death:

“Before dinner John sat by the fire in the living room and read to me out loud. The book from which he read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was rereading it to see how something worked technically. The sequence he read out loud was one in which Charlotte Douglas’ husband Leonard pays a visit to the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and lets her know that what is happening in the country her family runs will not end well. The sequence is complicated (this was in fact the sequence John had meant to reread to see how it worked technically), broken by other action and requiring the reader to pick up the undertext in what Leonard Douglas and Grace Strasser-Mendana say to each other. ‘Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book.  ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.’”

As a reader, I will need to reread this complex memoir in order to understand how it works technically. But even before reading the passage above, I knew two things–that the brokenness of it creates an undertext worth carefully unravelling. And that this woman and this man loved each other.

It is the second message I take to bed with me tonight. I have looked at Stuart, listened to him, and touched him with new wonder because of this book.

Magical thinking happens not only to the bereaved widow. Brushes with death, (such as reading about the death of another woman’s husband),  produce profound appreciation for life, for what we have and for whom we have, for however long we have them. What could be more magical?

The top 100 memoirs list we are constructing here is not a scientific one.  At the rate we are going, 81 posts in 9 months, and only 18 reviews so far, it will take five years to get to 100 memoirs! I’ve read many more than I have reviewed and have an entire bookcase of read and unread memoir waiting to be revealed to my gentle readers.  But since Ms. Memoir is already 60 years old, she needs some guidance about what subjects readers most want to know about.

Originally I thought I would review books almost exclusively.  Now, however, I have developed a whole list of other diverting memoir topics–see categories on the right-hand side.  The political campaign provided more grist for the memoir mill than I could every have imagined.  And then there’s life.  I notice in the tag cloud that mini-memoir has become the largest category.  I also notice that I seem to get more comments on mini-memoir than on reviews.  Hmmmm.

Since this is the second Rick Bragg book I read in a little more than a week, I won’t write as much about this one as I did his first memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’. The bottom line:  this one is just as good as the first.

You can tell a lot about a book by the kinds of review excerpts gleaned from other writers and printed on the back cover or opening pages of a book.  Here’s a sample.  Notice how many people try to come up with Southern witticisms to match Bragg’s own style:

“As toothsome as a catfish supper: [Bragg] is every bit the equal of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.”–People

“Rick Bragg has once more gone to the well of his family’s history and drawn readers a story that goes down like a long drink of sweet spring water–with a little taste of whiskey on the side.”–Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Rich in the raw materials of character and local color, enhanced by language marked with extravagance and economy–and the born storyteller’s gift for knowing when to be lavish with words and when to be lean.”–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Bragg writes like his grandfather drank. . . .He cuts loose with wonderful flowing descriptive floods. . .that can cripple another writer with envy.”–The Miami Herald

It’s as though these reviewer’s remember their own granddaddy telling them to avoid a pissing contest with a skunk–but they can’t help themselves.  And in fact, they admire the skunk’s perfume.

So, this “review” is not much more than a teaser this time.  All you need to know is that Rick Bragg tells a great story and that his innovation in this book is to “create” a grandfather he never knew out of family reunions, photographs, and interviews with his relatives and friends.  He illustrates one more motive for writing a memoir–getting to know the ancestor you never met in life.

Readers, I’d love some feedback to the categories on this blog:

Is the mix of reviewing, reflecting, and commenting on the news:

A. About right

B.  Too much reviewing

C. Too little reviewing

D. Too many mini-memoirs

E.  Not enough mini-memoirs

F.  Too much social commentary

G. Not enough social commentary

If you missed Parker Palmer’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, cheer up.  Here it is.

Apparently, the broadcast about illusion and reality in our current economic crisis, which included Parker talking about depression in his own life, cheered many people.  Funny how truth does that–in just the paradoxical way that Parker himself explains better than anyone I know.

Here is a Parker Palmer story from the transcript of the Bill Moyers Journal broadcast that has helped many people who, like myself, have known depression:

Parker: “I got tremendous help from a therapist at one point, in one of my depressions, who said to me, “Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”

The exchange between Bill and Parker that follows is one of the most honest depictions of the dark side of the inner life that you are ever likely to see on television. Be sure to check out the blog posts after you watch the video.  Notice how many of them appreciate this short segment about depression.

I have written about Parker’s important book, The Courage to Teach here before, when I was preparing to teach a workshop on reflective writing, but I have not written about him as a memoir writer.  His books all contain philosophical and social reflection, but they ring most true in their many personal narratives–often moments of self-deprecation, doubt, and fear.

Despite the fact that I have been a fan and then a friend of Parker’s for many years, I never placed him in the category of memoir writer until I began to notice–duh!– that even his most highly evolved political and social discourse finds its roots in questions and experiences from his own life.  Interestingly, Parker is seldom described as a memoir writer.  He is called author, spiritual teacher, educator, and activist.  It’s time to explore what he contributes to the field of memoir writing.

I will write more in future posts about several of Parker’s memoirs.  Until then, you can find more video, speeches, and interviews at the Center for Courage and Renewal website.

On the memoir bookshelf in my home office sit at least 100 memoirs.  Many of these are classics I read long ago without thinking of them as memoirs.  Some, like the one I focus on now, are famous books that fit the category but that I have never read.  Thinking about genre has allowed me to find and rediscover books and read them with a new eye for form and substance.

Several people have told me that Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is on the list of their top ten memoirs. Now I understand why.

But first I must admit that I could not escape the thought, reading this book, that an ailing man in his 60′s who will soon commit suicide is writing it.  (He finished the book in the fall of 1960.  On July 2, 1961, he pulled both triggers of a double-barreled shotgun aimed at his head.)  Oh yes, and did I mention that, as I write these words, I am almost as old as the old man.

Hemingway the old man breathes in this book.  We see the old man as he looks at his young first wife Hadley almost as if to say that she was the mold for all the other women who followed.   We see the old man as we read the deep appreciation for Sylvia Beach and her generous lending policies and nurturing spirit toward struggling young writers at her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.

The word portraits the old man paints of Gertrude Stein and her “companion” (never mentioning the name of Alice B. Toklas) and of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald bring them to life as complex human beings with great talent and greater failings.  Hemingway the competitor assessing other competitors comes through even though in 1960 both Stein and Fitzgerald are dead.  This memoir destroys Gertrude Stein’s claim to have invented the phrase, “The Lost Generation” and shows Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and his wife to be the enemy of his art.

Ironically, the alcoholism and difficulties with women Hemingway sees in Fitzgerald, as well as the fierce protection of reputation and competition with other writers he describes in Stein, apply equally to himself.  How self-aware and reader-aware could he have been?  We cannot know, and, because the book succeeds brilliantly in other ways, we do not care.

Throughout, Hemingway employs the metaphor of eating and drinking to describe how important writing was to him when he was living in Paris from the ages of 22 to 27.  He quotes Hadley as saying, “Memory is hunger.”  The scenes in this memoir alternate between the gnawing of near starvation and the relish of simple food and drink–tangerines, chestnuts, oysters, little goujon fish pulled out of the Seine and consumed bones and all.  We feel the immense appetites of the young man as he writes, walks, talks, gossips, gambles, and makes love.  This feast moves to the reader, and we understand why the phrase joie de vivre is untranslatable, except, perhaps, by this young American writer in Paris.

Hemingway hated formula writing.  He fumed when Fitzgerald admitted he changed his stories to fit standard tastes for Saturday Evening Post editors and readers.  But he had his own formula for the writing process, which is one of the biggest gifts to other writers:  “I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and to let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

The practice of writing while hungry, going to the deep well of memory and imagination, then resting and forgetting, eating and drinking, returning and writing again–all that was established in Hemingway at the age of 22.  He recognized that the best feasts are not only moveable but they are so because deep, mysterious wells fill up the writer’s cup so that the feast continues day to day and place to place.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

–Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950

In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt.  Hope you come back to read this little review.

Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure and genre–narratives, essays, and meditations.  Most of the chapters were published previously in literary journals.  The publisher is Red Hen Press.  Since publishing individual essays first is one of the routes I am considering in my own writing, I was especially interested to see how a complete set of essays, beginning with a memoir of the author’s father and concluding with a meditation on aging, would either hang together or seem fragmented.

The answer I discovered is–both.  As a product of a postmodern life in academe (a long career at Emerson College), the author is highly conscious of fragments, employing them deliberately.  Most of the essays highlight fragments in their structure, using subheadings or little printer’s breaks to indicate the loss of linear progress.  This lack of flow in the short run, however, does not stop the stream of consciousness.  As one thought or memory leaves off, another picks up–like rivulets of beaded water flowing over a dusty riverbed.  The necessary repetition of certain facts in separate essays does not seem jarring but accumulates force.  We see the author’s wife Connie, for example, through many different lenses–as teacher, lover, mother, dog catcher, partner, and independent thinker.  The same is true of the sister, brothers, nephew, parents, and colleagues who enter and exit the various stories in different roles.

Amazingly, the author, who has been honest with us about his negative feelings toward his obese, recovered/alcoholic father, and who has steadfastly refused a sentimental view of any family member, returns in his own old age to some of the same values his father held.  Like his father, he takes delight in the growth and progress of his children, even more after they leave home than before.  And like his father, he recognizes the power–even saving power–of the women in his life.

I would probably not chosen to read a book called Safe Suicide without encouragement from the author.  But I am glad I got past an initial aversion to the title to experience deeply the pastiche of a life as noble in its ordinariness as my own–or yours.  I recognized, and loved, the many Shakespearian allusions sprinkled through these essays.  DeWitt Henry is an English professor’s English professor.  He does not just read the richest texts in the English language; he literally takes them to heart.  Art is life and life is art in this memoir.

Henry concludes his last essay with words that summarize the philosophy that ties all the fragments of his life together: “Life itself is our glory and our ordeal, our measure of heart, and of passion.  We do our best. There is no finish line.”

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“Ralph Waldo Emerson could have learned a thing or two about self reliance from my great-great-grandparents,” asserts Mildred Armstrong Kalish near the beginning of her book Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. I knew I would love this book when I read those lines, and I was not disappointed.  This book is a love song for childhood in general and for a certain kind of youth almost extinct in American now–a childhood without television, videogames, play dates, nursery schools, organized sports, allowance, sex education, or fast food.  If it were just about hard times, it would have been depressing or boring.  The high spirits that flow through this book, however, also infect the reader.

The title of the book comes from Mildred’s grandmother who once saw her daughter’s brood cavorting naked on the lawn, washing down the stubbles from a day in the hay fields with water from a hose. 

“‘A body’d think you had had no upbringing,’” she proclaimed.  “‘They’d think that you’d been peed on a stump and hatched by the sun.’”

When even the verbal lashings a child receives are this colorful, no time can be hard enough to repress high spirits.  Combined with a decent literary education from aphorisms, hymns, memorized poetry, books, and classroom, a child could grow up to join the Coast Guard in WWII, use the GI Bill to go to college, become a college professor, mother, grandmother, and write a memoir that was reviewed by the hottest memoir writer of the moment–Elizabeth Gilbert–right there on the front cover of the book review section of The New York Times, July 1, 2007. That’s what happened to Mildred.

Mildred Armstrong grew up without knowing her own father, who apparently was banished for some impropriety early in her childhood.  Elizabeth Gilbert points out that a lot of memoirists would have made this story the center, perhaps even painting themselves as victims. But Mildred chooses what to forget and what to remember, discarding the negative in favor of gratitude for the positive.  She had a loving mother who allowed lots of freedom as well as strict (and loving) grandparents who offered structure and an uncommon measure of common sense.  She had siblings, teachers, and a maiden aunt who challenged her and believed in her.  And she must have had (and has!) an incredible memory and organizing system for her remembered past.

My own childhood has many things in common with Kalish’s, and my mother, who is just a few years younger than Mildred, has told me stories from her own girlhood in the Depression that resonate even better with these.  The descriptions of food, church, family, pranks, and creative, frugal celebrations all hit home, but here is my very favorite, the description of going down the pasture to fetch the cows:

“You can’t commune with Mother Earth with shoes on your feet.  I follow the deeply rutted, dusty path worn by the cows down to the end of the narrow lane where I first encounter the tender, cool grasses of the pasture.  A dozen locust trees adorned with their clusters of ivory-colored blossoms are all abuzz with a congregation of honey and bumblebees.  The rich sweet fragrance is almost overwhelming.”

Kalish follows Wordsworth’s maxim about poetry and recollects emotion in tranquility here.  She first lived her experience, then recognized her experience in the words of poets and authors, and now condenses both for us in word pictures that stir the soul.

I thought of this book when Barack Obama’s primary victory in Iowa launched him as a serious contender for the presidency in the face of Hillary Clinton’s formidable advantages at the time.  Those hearty midwesterners were seeing past the color of Barack Obama’s skin to the content of his character–a character shaped by his midwestern grandparents about the same age as Mildred Kalish.

I thought of this book again during the last month as stock prices tumbled and the whole globe trembled with fear of a deep, world-wide Depression.  If we are, indeed, headed for such a time, we could find a lot of hope by reading how material poverty produced in Mildred Armstrong Kalish and her “greatest” generation the kind of values, skills, and yes–high spirits–that we always need and may need now more than ever.

Check out the book from your local library.  Frugal Mildred won’t mind.