Book: American Lives: A Reader
Author: various
Published: 2010 (University of Nebraska Press)
Pages: 300
These chunks pulled from full-length memoirs made good
episodic reading that brought me back to earth.
All of them had the same sheen of quiet honesty, which was
great because it pulled me into the humor and gravitas with equal strength. But
that same sheen made reading things like multiple excerpts on losing children
(in utero and born) less affecting than they would have been standing alone.
Some of the excerpts were so short I couldn’t tell why they bothered to use
that section instead of another.
My favorite, “Son of Mr.Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing
Fathers,” was set up as a list of dictionary-style definitions mixed with
personal connections to the concepts being explained. It nicely spiraled into
itself to make its point in the way that a kid with a missing father would
piece together his feelings about that as he grew up and slowly learned what it
meant. That would’ve been super annoying to read in a whole 300-page book, but
as a collected piece itself it was really effective.
None of these memoirs were uncomfortably
navel-gazing; they all gave good reasons outside their authors for being
written. Latched together, they made a smooth patchwork of the genre.
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