I have become a big fan of memoirs. Not biographies, but books where interesting individuals explore major events in their own lives.
It began with One Hundred Names for Love, Diane Ackerman’s memoir of life with her husband, novelist Paul West, after he suffered a stroke that affected his ability to communicate. This was a very personal memoir for me. I took several courses from Paul when he taught at Penn State. More than that, I thought of him as a mentor and role model at a time when I hoped to become a writer myself. I don’t know Diane, but we very likely were both students at Penn State during the late sixties and early seventies. She is a wonderful writer in her own right, the author of The Natural History of the Senses,among other books. She had been researching a book about the brain when Paul suffered his stroke. As a result, her memoir starts with the science of what he suffered and expands to explore how their relationship evolved as he recovered and, ultimately, how he himself experienced the stroke and its aftermath. The powerful aspect of this memoir, though, is her description of their daily life together, both before and after the stroke.
I then read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which starts with the sudden death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, and her life over the next twelve months. I knew little about Didion at the time. I discovered that she was an inspiration for a generation of women and that she and her husband had been an important screenwriting team. From her narrative, I learned that she was also a “tough customer.” As she describes it, when her husband died, she went to the hospital, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. When the attending physician came in, she overheard the EMT tell him, “It’s okay. She’s a tough customer.” For a while, she takes that as an ironic nickname. Reading Magical Thinking was a bit like moving into a new neighborhood and getting to know a wonderful, but complex neighbor.
I had just finished Magical Thinkingwhen Karen and I took a vacation to Maine. We stopped by the public library in Kennebunkport, where I was delighted to find a copy of John Gregory Dunne’s last novel. Interesting how reading can become a family affair. Didion completed a second memoir—about the death of her daughter—before she died earlier this year. I have yet to read that one, but I will.
I knew almost nothing about Patti Smith, the punk rock poet, until I picked up Just Kids, her memoir about her early days in New York and her relationship with the photographer Robert Maplethorpe. She is just about my age. She ran away to New York from New Jersey in the 1960s and recounts her life there during the flowering of the American counter culture. I was amazed to read about a peer’s experiences, so different from my own, but with many of the same cultural contexts as background. I immediately went out and bought Horses, her breakthrough album.
This week, I started another memoir—Along the Way, a father-son memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Again, I was confronted by two people who experienced some of the same events that I did—the death of Robert Kennedy, for instance—but from two very different perspectives: one, a man a few years older than me; the other, his son, much younger than me. I could identify with both as they talked about their experiences in the 1960s—Martin getting starting his career and his family in a time of cultural revolution, Emilio experiencing a nomadic childhood in a strong family. I am still reading this one, but it promises to be very revealing of the dynamics between two creative people in a demanding profession.
What I like about all of these books is the way these first-person accounts are like sitting down and catching up with an old friend. In the end, I feel a personal connection with the authors. It is a fantastic literary experience.
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