Category Archives: Nonfiction

I loved this memoir so much! It’s O’Connell’s account of being pregnant, giving birth, and getting through the early years of being a parent, and so much of it either matched or echoed my own experience. I sighed and winced and laughed my way through it. The first section — which does not match my experience at all — is about her unexpected discovery that she’s pregnant and the decision she and her fiancé had to make about whether to go forward with the pregnancy. Then she describes her childbirth experience, and what a harrowing account it is! My own birth story is much shorter and simpler than hers is, but I still related to so many of her feelings and worries. My favorite part was her description of what it’s like to have an infant, particularly how it’s possible to have post-partum depression and not fully realize it, even while being fully aware that post-partum depression is a thing one should look out for. So many little details resonated with me, like the way she made a point of doing the dishes every day so she could listen to podcasts and get a break from the world of babies. And how hard it is to leave an infant in daycare but how absolutely necessary it is to do so to keep oneself sane — and to keep one’s job.

I loved how honest O’Connell is about how hard it is to be a new parent — how wonderful, yes, but also how hard. I think there’s a little more space these days for women to be open about the difficulties of motherhood, but there’s still not nearly enough. I felt relief reading about O’Connell’s struggles, which tells me there aren’t enough voices out there telling these kinds of stories.

I recently finished another book by one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Janet Malcolm; I’d already read The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Two Lives, about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, and now I have finished In the Freud Archives, a book about psychoanalysis and Freud scholars. The Silent Woman is my favorite so far, and will probably stay my favorite, but In the Freud Archives is a close second, and possibly is second only because psychoanalysis isn’t all that interesting to me, whereas Plath and Hughes are. With Malcolm, though, it doesn’t matter much whether the topic at hand is inherently interesting or not, because she makes it interesting. All these books follow a similar format: Malcolm takes an academic, literary, or cultural controversy and digs deep into the story, interviewing the major players and charting out the various sides of the conflict. She herself is a part of the narrative; although she is good at keeping the focus on the story at hand, she does give her personal impressions of the major characters and offers her particular slant on the story.

In the Freud book, as in the others, Malcolm is writing on a number of different levels. In the Freud Archives (published in 1984) is a book about controversies among Freud scholars, specifically about who will control the archives with many letters that scholars have not had a chance to study. It’s a story about Dr. Eissler, a distinguished Freud scholar and analyst, and Jeffrey Masson, a younger man who started his career as a Sanskrit scholar and found his way into the world of psychoanalysis. Eissler becomes a mentor to Masson, grooming him to take control of the archives. But Masson is a controversial figure among analysts; he is too pushy and too overtly ambitious, he seemed to come out of nowhere and made his way to the top of the field all too easily, and his views on Freud are increasingly unorthodox. The “plot” of the book is about the relationship between Eissler and Masson and about Masson’s status in the psychoanalytic world.

But In the Freud Archives is about Freud, too; we learn about what kind of a thinker and analyst Freud really was and about the development of his thought in his early years, the focus of Masson’s research. We learn about the history of the discipline and of scholarship on Freud. The way Malcolm describes it, psychoanalysis and Freud studies seem to be at a crisis point in the 1980s — or at least at a vulnerable moment — with a comfortable scholarly establishment too willing to overlook flaws in their theories and in their founder, an environment ripe for someone like Masson to come in and shake things up.

The book is also about Malcolm as well; she describes the settings in which she conducted her interviews and her impressions of all the major players. It’s also about her in a sense she couldn’t have predicted when she first wrote the book. My edition, from NYRB, contains an afterward written by Malcolm that describes the book’s aftermath: Masson sued her for libel and she spent 10 years fighting him in the courts. She was ultimately successful, but the episode shows the dangers of writing this kind of nonfiction. It’s impossible to know how one’s subjects will react to having their lives and careers dissected in print.

I kept thinking as I read the book that it would be interesting to have some one pull a “Janet Malcolm” on Malcolm herself — to write about the making of this book, the book’s reception, and the ensuing lawsuit and to follow up on what has happened in psychoanalysis and Freud studies in the years between then and now. In the Freud Archives is an absorbing read and an intriguing look into one corner of the scholarly world, but I have the feeling that there’s more of this story to be told.

I couldn’t decide for a while whether I loved or hated Lauren Slater’s book Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Finally, maybe a quarter of the way into it, I decided I loved it and I never changed my mind again. But it’s the kind of book I would think carefully about before I recommended it to anyone, as it strikes me as potentially hateable. It seems that Slater has a talent for stirring up controversy (whether this is what she intends or not, I’m not sure). My first introduction to her was the 2006 edition of The Best American Essays where she was the year’s guest editor. Her introduction to the anthology told the story of how her book Opening Skinner’s Box provoked all kinds of anger from all kinds of people, but especially professional psychologists, of which she is one herself. Apparently, people didn’t like her portrayal of famous psychological experiments, and they disliked it enough to start an email listserve called “Slater-Hater,” which she followed for a while. The openness with which she discussed this episode, which surely was extremely painful, impressed me, and I’ve been intrigued by her ever since.

So, as you can guess from the title, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is no traditional memoir; instead, it’s a book where she claims to have epilepsy, but also refuses to tell you whether that’s actually true or not. It might just be a metaphor for something else she is trying to communicate about her life, something about mental illness. She describes the experience of epilepsy in great detail, though, telling about her first seizures and the process of figuring out the disease, describing the various forms of treatment she received, and describing the way she would pretend to have seizures or purposely induce seizures for dramatic effect. The most dramatic part of the book comes when she describes surgery to have her corpus callosum severed — the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres. Her doctor believed that this wouldn’t cure her fully but would cut down dramatically on the number and severity of the seizures, which is did — or which she says it did. It also left her with some strange side effects, such as not being able to read with her left eye closed, since the right side of the brain processes language.

All this is described in a totally convincing way, but the reader has no way of knowing what to believe. Slater discusses this directly, though, telling the reader why she’s writing the way she is:

Is it possible to narrate an honest nonfiction story if you are a slippery sort? I, for one, am a slippery sort, but I believe I’m also an honest sort because I admit my slipperiness. And, therefore, to come clean in this memoir would be dishonest; it would be to go against my nature, which would be just the sort of inauthenticity any good nonfiction memoirist, whose purpose is to capture the essence of the narrator, could not accommodate. I truly believe that if I came completely clean I would be telling the biggest lie of all, and at heart I am not a liar, I am passionately dedicated to the truth, which, by the way, is not necessarily the same thing as fact, so loosen up!

I love this. She writes a book called Lying in which she refuses to tell us the facts but says she is not a liar! Which is totally possible, of course — she’s exploring lying, or she is revealing the truth indirectly, using lies, or the possibility of lies, to tell a kind of truth. This passage comes from a memo she (supposedly) wrote to her editor about how to market the book, which shows her other interest: reader’s expectations of genre. She says in this memo that her purpose is:

among a lot of other things, to ponder the blurry line between novels and memoirs. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it’s obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what’s what, and does it even matter?

For me, it didn’t matter much. I didn’t care whether she really had epilepsy or not; the book was meaningful to me whether the epilepsy was literal or a metaphor, and I liked going back and forth between the two possibilities. There’s an emotional honesty that comes through all the playfulness. I came to trust her, oddly, for just the reasons she said we should trust her: she may be telling lies, but she never claims to be telling the truth either.

She also tells some riveting stories, especially the one about her time at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She applies during the summer before she begins college, lying on her application that she is 19 years old, the minimum age. She gets rejected. She is sure this is a mistake, however, so she changes her name and applies again, making sure she gets a different reader. She gets in this time. But the fact that her writing sample is erotic in nature and that her new reader is male are both significant to what happens next. And then there is the story about accidentally joining AA, a group that becomes hugely meaningful to her but which she has joined under false pretenses, and she doesn’t know how to come clean.

There is so little that’s certain in this book, beginning with the introduction and continuing through to the end, but living with that uncertainty was surprisingly enjoyable, and even exhilarating. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some readers find Slater to be unbearably coy, and some might find her tricks irritating, such as putting her acknowledgments page in the middle of the book. But I loved all that, and I admire Slater’s courage, for surely it takes courage to refuse to give the reader solid ground to stand on, and surely it takes talent to make such a book so fascinating to read.

Laura Miller’s Magician’s Book, about C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, was a hugely enjoyable read, and I say that not being the biggest Chronicles of Narnia reader. I read at least some of the books when I was a kid, but I’m not quite sure how many. I reread some of them as a young adult, although again, I’m not sure how many. I liked them fine, but I didn’t fall in love. Miller talks about those who fall in love with Narnia and/or Tolkien’s Middle Earth and those who fall in love with realistic novels like Little House on the Prairie and Little Women, and I definitely fall in the latter camp. But that didn’t matter much in terms of how I felt about The Magician’s Book; it was a great meditation on childhood reading, as well as on the meaning and context of Lewis’s work.

I particularly admired how much Miller pulled together into one book and how she kept all her material orderly and coherent. She writes about her obsession with Narnia, how it happened and how it influenced the rest of her reading life. She writes about children’s literature in general and the ways people value it, or don’t. She writes about Lewis’s life, his literary friendships, his scholarship, and his religious beliefs. She also writes about the meaning of the Chronicles themselves. Oh, and there are discussions of things like allegory, myth, and romance, of medieval literature and the medieval mindset, of the different ways Lewis and Tolkien thought about Englishness.

It’s a lot of material, but Miller makes it work, partly by using short-ish chapters that each focus on one aspect of the series or its context, and also by using a loose overarching structure that keeps it all feeling coherent. The larger story of her book is one of first falling in love with the Chronicles, then becoming angry with Lewis and rejecting the books after discovering their Christian content, and finally rediscovering the series as an adult and accounting for the fact that she still loves the books even if she rejects their religious argument. Miller had no idea as a child that the Chronicles were meant as a retelling of sorts of the gospel story — that Aslan was supposed to be Christ, for example. When she found this out, basically by accident, she felt betrayed, a feeling made all the stronger because of how much she had loved the books in the first place. She had already decided she had no use for Christianity, so Lewis’s piousness and his attempts to proselytize through fiction did not go over well.

So, with this structure in place, a story that forms the book’s three main sections, Miller first discusses the value of children’s fiction and tells her own reading history, as well as what it was about the Chronicles she loved so much. The second section on rejecting Lewis includes chapters on his various failings, for example, his (arguable) misogyny and racism. The last section is partly about how it’s possible to value the Chronicles even if you reject the Christianity in them, and also how the Chronicles sprang out of Lewis’s love of allegory, myths, and fairy tales and about Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien and their different approaches to writing fantasy.

Miller is a companionable guide through all this. I like the balance she struck between her personal narrative and the more critical material; the personal element gives the book drive and interest as well as a sense of why the project matters, and the critical material provides a fabulous background to understanding the Chronicles and thinking about children’s literature, fantasy in particular. My one quibble is that I sometimes felt she portrayed Christianity in a way that’s a little too simple; she conflates evangelicalism and fundamentalism, for example, and doesn’t really acknowledge the many other, particularly more liberal, forms of Christianity that are out there. But otherwise, her command of the material is impressive. I didn’t find that my unfamiliarity with most of the Narnia books was a problem; her descriptions of the books provide enough detail that I could follow along. If I hadn’t ever read any of the Chronicles, I probably would have found the book less compelling, but you don’t have to be a Lewis fan to appreciate what Miller has done.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson is not exactly a traditional biography. It does tell Dorothy’s life story, but it doesn’t try to include all the details or treat all the times in her life equally. Instead, it moves through her early years quickly, rushes through the last five decades at breakneck speed, and spends most of its time on the years of the Grasmere Journals, four journals she kept from 1800 to the very beginning of 1803. In this section, she spends a lot of time discussing the journals themselves, reading them closely for insights into Dorothy’s life at this time, and also using details from Dorothy’s life to illuminate the journals. It was the most exciting, most famous time in her long life: the time when she and William Wordsworth collaborated on their writing and tramped all over the Lake District, with Coleridge as their frequent companion.

The picture Wilson creates of Dorothy is different than the one I had in mind and the one painted by her letters (which I wrote about here). I had always thought of her as an avid walker, which she was, and also a dreamy, melancholy type, a person who thought and felt deeply, moody and brooding, a woman of sensibility, full of Romantic longing. The letters portray her as a quiet family woman, a person devoted to her brothers, nieces, and nephews and concerned above all else for their welfare. She was at least some of those things, but in Wilson’s biography, she is also very charismatic and full of energy and life:

Those who knew Dorothy in her hot youth describe her as possessing all the wildness of the Brontë heroines she helped to inspire. It was the quality of her gaze they noticed first. For John Thelwall, the radical, she was “the maid of ardent eye”; Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey,” famously praised “the shooting lights” of her “wild eyes,” which were a clear and light gray-blue, and Coleridge, taking his cue, wrote of “the wild lights in her eyes.” De Quincey described her eyes as “wild and startling” and Dorothy as “all fire, and … ardour,” the “very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known.” She had something of the “gipsy” to her, De Quincey said…

It’s this wildness that’s intriguing, and also her anxieties and what Wilson calls her neurotic personality. At the center of Wilson’s biography is a very strange scene from Dorothy journal, which takes place on Williams’s wedding day. She is devastated by the wedding, completely undone, although she has known it would happen for many months and sees William’s wife Mary as a close friend whom she is very fond of. But she had had William all to herself for several years and now, although she will continue to live with him, she will have to share him. Here is the scene from Dorothy’s journal:

On Monday 4th October 1802, my Brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson …William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring — with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before — he slipped it again onto my finger & blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara [Mary’s sister] prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything, till Sara came upstairs to me & said “They are coming.” This forced me from the bed where I lay & I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William & fell upon his bosom….

This is a bizarre scene for a lot of reasons — the exchange of the wedding ring that mimics a wedding ceremony, her loss of consciousness when she realizes the wedding is over, her propulsion into William’s bosom at the end. Her relationship with William was the defining factor of her life, and readers have long speculated on its nature. Could it have been incestuous? Or haunted by unfulfilled sexual longing? Or of a more ethereal, spiritual nature?

Wilson handles all these questions well and other tricky ones such as the nature of Dorothy’s mental illness in her later years (a very sad story). She weaves Dorothy’s words into her text, using italics for language from the journals, with no quotation marks. This could come across as presumptuous, perhaps, implying that Wilson’s mind has somehow melded with Dorothy’s, but instead it comes across as intensely devoted and sympathetic while at the same time, somehow, not losing a feeling of objectivity.

Another aspect of Wilson’s biography that surprised me is her description of Dorothy as not given to self-reflection or self-awareness. She is a creature of surfaces, not at all, as Wilson says, like Mary Shelley who wrote in her diary, “Let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind, carry the torch of self-knowledge into its dimmest recesses.” Dorothy prefers to stay on the outside, observing the natural world or writing accounts of actions rather than thoughts. It’s true that self-revealing moments in the journals are rare and Dorothy rarely tells us what she is thinking, but I wonder whether it’s right to move from the evidence of the journals to making a claim about what goes on in Dorothy’s mind. Her record of her life is very incomplete, after all. But it’s fascinating to think of this woman surrounded by Romantic poets, living out what seems to be an intensely Romantic life, and not being terribly interested in exploring the movements of her own mind.

As I said in my previous post, Wilson’s biography made me want to pick up the journals again, which I have, and I’m now reading through them very slowly. It’s easy to skim over her entries and feel like you’ve gotten the gist, but Wilson’s book makes a case for taking one’s time with them and treating them more like poetry than prose, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

I happened to pick up a copy of Dorothy Wordsworth’s selected letters while in London — I have her journals and a biography, so it seemed appropriate to get some letters as well — and on a whim I began reading them while flying back to the U.S. The letters were interesting; I enjoyed the glimpse into Dorothy’s life they gave, and it’s always fun to read about that group of great writers who spent so much time together, Dorothy, William Wordsworth, and Coleridge, with appearances now and then by Thomas De Quincey and Charles and Mary Lamb. The letters are also fairly tame and quiet since Dorothy is being her best social self, although it was fun to see her putting an aunt firmly in her place by insisting that there is nothing improper in going on a long walking tour with her brother:

I cannot pass unnoticed that part of your letter in which you speak of my “rambling about the country on foot.” So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise — but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.

As Dorothy is penniless at this point, saving thirty shillings is significant. I love the fact that she is basically running away from home here. She’s not sneaking off exactly, but she has left the aunt and uncle who have taken care of her since her mother died, and her relatives are not particularly pleased with her. This was unconventional behavior. She and William walk for the next two days, the first day to Grasmere, which is where they will live five years later during that famous time William Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote their Lyrical Ballads and she wrote her Grasmere journals, and the second day to Keswick, where they stayed with friends.

This is, perhaps, the point at which she finally grows up. She is 23 at the time, having spent most of her life up to this point separated from her four brothers. Her mother died when she was six, the event that shook up the family and sent her off to live with her aunt and uncle. Her father died when she was 12, but even then, she didn’t see her family. Finally, now that she is in her 20s, she is reunited with her long-lost brothers, and at this point, she is making her dramatic move — leaving her guardians and clinging to William, with whom she will live for decades to come.

She is also establishing her reputation as a serious walker. She will walk miles and miles, most famously in the area around Grasmere. She and William, accompanied sometimes by neighbors and friends, will cover the same ground again and again, getting to know their area intimately, and their walks will inspire the poetry and poetic prose to come. It’s fitting that part of her striking out on her own with William involves a defense of the value of walking: it’s healthy and pleasurable, and it’s using the great gift given to herby nature — her strength.

After reading the letters, I thought I would pick up a recent biography of Dorothy, Frances Wilson’s book The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. I’m nearing the end of it now. I quickly decided that reading the biography meant I needed to reread the Grasmere journals as well, so I’m in the middle of those too. The biography and the journals paint quite a different picture of Dorothy than the letters do. But more on that later.

I picked up Stephanie Staal’s book Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life on a whim at the library and read it relatively quickly over the July 4th weekend. It was a good book, an enjoyable and interesting read, although I found it more interesting for the personal stories told than for the discussions of feminist texts. Perhaps it was because I was already familiar with many of the books she discussed and her summaries of their main arguments didn’t go beyond the basics, but I was always a little relieved when she returned to her personal story.

The book begins with Staal’s frustration with her situation in life — unexpectedly finding herself a dissatisfied wife and mother who was struggling to keep a career going. She decided to look for books by women who addressed the frustrations she was feeling, and she found herself looking through the Women’s Studies section of her local bookstore searching for wisdom. Eventually she hits on the idea of retaking the “Fem. Texts” course she took at Barnard as an undergrad. She will read or reread the great works of feminism to see what she can learn from them the second time around, and also to see how she has changed and how the students taking the class have changed from her undergrad days. (The premise of the book is in essence the same as David Denby’s Great Books where he goes back to Columbia to retake their “Great Books” curriculum, and she doesn’t mention this. I kind of thought she should have.)

The book takes us through her year of reading, beginning with Genesis and the Garden of Eden story, and hitting many of the great feminist writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Helene Cixous, and many others. Staal intersperses discussions of these writers and descriptions of classroom dynamics with stories about her life. She writes about raising her daughter while trying to keep a freelance career going, about moving to Maryland from New York City and trying to fit into the very different culture there, about her sometimes troubled marriage and her struggles getting her husband to understand what she was feeling and to help out more around the house. She’s dismayed at the distance she has traveled from her undergrad self, from the person who would not have believed that she would one day find herself feeling trapped in the house taking care of a child. She found she identified much too closely with the audience of dissatisfied 1950s housewives Betty Friedan addressed in The Feminine Mystique.

Not surprisingly, taking the Fem. Texts course leads Staal to more questions than answers, but she does take comfort in reading how other women grappled with the those same questions. There was less comfort to be found from observing her young classmates. She admires their self-confidence, but also feels that feminism has taken a wrong turn somewhere. She is disturbed by certain aspects of third-wave feminism, especially the easy comfort the students feel with pornography and our highly-sexualized culture. She worries about what her daughter will face as she grows older.

This book would be worth reading for anyone who wants an introduction to feminist texts (it comes complete with reading lists), and for anyone who wants to read about one woman’s struggles to stay true to her feminist values. I enjoyed it most for the latter, but it does both well.

Andre Dubus III’s memoir Townie is a harrowing read. It wasn’t quite on the same level of emotional intensity as Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir A Widow’s Story, but it, like Oates’s book, was both hard to put down and hard to shake off once I had put it down. It left me feeling somber and needing a little recovery time afterward. All of which I mean in a positive way — Townie was perhaps a bit too long (as was Oates’s book), but still, awfully good.

It tells the story of Dubus’s experiences growing up poor, first with his mother and his famous writer father, but soon enough with his mother alone, along with his three siblings. Even when the family was together, they never had much money, but his parents’ divorce turned a manageable situation into an extremely precarious one. His mother did her best to keep the family going, but money was always short — the family often went hungry — and the mother was either working or home exhausted and wasn’t able to keep tabs on what the children were doing. They moved frequently and usually lived in rough neighborhoods in decaying Massachusetts towns. These were former mill towns where vacant buildings were everywhere and unemployment was high.

Dubus was small and quickly became a target for bullies. Soon enough he was getting beaten up just about every day and lived in fear of running into the wrong people. Even his home wasn’t safe; knowing there were no adults around, local young people would hold afternoon parties in his living room. There was nothing he could do about it. His siblings tried to help him out by telling their mother about the beatings, but not much came of it.

This story of living in constant fear is one of the main threads of the book; eventually, after years of being bullied and doing nothing about it, Dubus decides he can’t take it anymore, and he begins to lift weights. He also learns how to box at a local gym. It takes a long time, but finally he learns that if he is the one who punches first, if he takes his opponent by surprise, he can win a fight. This is a breakthrough moment, a turn of events that lets him feel proud of himself, finally. But there is a downside: now that he has learned how to let his anger out, he isn’t sure he can control it. He becomes the guy who can defend innocent victims, but he is also the guy who starts fights and sends people to the hospital. Does he really want to be that way and are there better ways to handle his anger?

The other major thread running through the book is his relationship with his father. Dubus the father never fully abandoned his children; he sent money faithfully even though he never had much, and he took them out to dinner on Sundays and spent Wednesday evenings with his kids one at a time so they had a chance to see him on their own once a month. But still, there was so much he never knew about what his kids were going through, and poor as he was, his life was much more comfortable than his ex-wife’s. There are painful scenes where he tries to play catch with his son and learns that the son knows absolutely nothing about catching and throwing a ball or about baseball itself. How was he supposed to learn? Dubus never tells his father the truth about his life, out of shyness and shame. He mostly just felt uneasy around his father and was relieved to get away. As Dubus grows older, his relationship with his father becomes much closer, but he is still left with questions: how much should he tell his father? Would there be any point in hurting his father in that way?

Dubus’s story is riveting, both because of its inherent drama and because of the questions it raises about poverty, rage, and violence, and also about what it takes to leave a difficult childhood behind. Dubus writes extremely well: he conjures up the atmosphere of the mill towns he grew up in and evokes his feelings of hopelessness and fear so powerfully that you feel you are experiencing everything alongside him. I heard Dubus say in an interview that he had tried to write about his childhood in fiction but failed, and it was only in the memoir form that he found he could tell the story. In the book he writes about creating characters who were essentially himself, but the stories were never any good because he was trying too hard to make the reader sympathize with his fictionalized self. I don’t quite know what it was about the transition to nonfiction that made telling his story possible, but something clicked for him, and he has told the story wonderfully.

I think I’m going to be behind in my usual blog business — responding to comments, reading other people’s blogs — for a while, but thank goodness spring break is coming up next week. I will be back in the swing of things very soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to point out my review of Sarah Bakewell’s book How to Live: or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which is over at the Quarterly Conversation. The short version of my review: I liked it very much. If you’d like to read more, the review is here.

I’ve had very good luck with nonfiction so far this year, including Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, and now Deb Olin Unferth’s book Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. I loved every moment of this all-too-short book (a very fast 200 pages). It’s exactly what a memoir should be: entertaining, thoughtful, smart, funny, self-reflective, and even self-critical, with exactly the right kind of self-absorption, the kind that manages to say interesting things about the writer but also about a whole lot more. It tells the story of how during her freshman year in college in the 1980s Unferth met and fell in love with George, an unusual young man, a Christian with counter-cultural leanings. The two of them dropped out of school to go to Central America and join the revolutions fomenting there.

The book is extremely well-written. I’ve been trying to put into words exactly what I like about its style, and it’s been hard. Somehow Unferth manages to say a lot more than just what’s on the page. Her sentences are short and simple, with hardly a word wasted. She’s great at moving towards a larger meaning, hinting at it, and then leaving you to take the final leap. I usually prefer a more maximalist, wordy style, but this version of minimalism worked for me because it managed to say more than it seemed to. The book is written in short chapters, sometimes only a page long, each telling a story or vignette or exploring an idea. It holds together as a coherent whole, but the short chapters give it a fractured feeling that somehow makes everything more believable. It’s not a seamless narrative, but instead the chapters offer glimpses of or angles into the story. It’s a method that doesn’t promise to fit everything together neatly, because such a thing is impossible.

The story is not told in chronological order. In fact, she starts by telling us the ending, how she and her boyfriend returned from their travels in Central America and all she wanted to do was go to McDonald’s. Then, in chapter 2, she tells the whole story in just a few lines. The next 199 pages or so merely fill in the details:

My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution.

We couldn’t find the first revolution.

The second revolution hired us on and then let us go.

We went to the other revolutions in the area — there were several — but every one we came to let us hang around for a few weeks and then made us leave.

We ran out of money and at last we came home.

I was eighteen. That’s the whole story.

From there, the narrative moves back to the beginning of the trip in Mexico, when Unferth and her boyfriend find themselves in a shantytown outside Mexico City and panic when they get lost. From there, there is steady progress through the various countries they visited, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, to give the story some narrative momentum, but interspersed among these present-action sections are flashbacks to Unferth’s college days when she first met George and converted to Christianity, and also to her younger years with her family. The narrative also moves forward now and then to tell about what happened after the trip was over, about the difficulty she had readjusting to life in the U.S. and about what happened to her relationship with George. All this back and forth movement works. There’s the potential for it to be confusing, but it never is, except in the way our memories can sometimes be confusing; instead, the structure evokes the sense of what it is like for Unferth to look back on that time of her life, to remember all the details and think about their larger significance.

Let me close by giving you a short chapter in its entirety to give you a sense of her style:

Years later I heard that the Sandinistas referred to us as Sandalistas, not Internacionalistas. We wore Birkenstocks, right? A bunch of hippies, ha, ha. I don’t recall hearing that during the revolution, only after. I believe the Nicaraguans called us Sandalistas behind our backs.

That’s okay. I can take (or be) a joke.

In fact I did wear sandals. I brought on the trip my smartest pair, not Birkenstocks, but a strappy affair. It turned out the revolution was going to involve a lot of walking. A week into Mexico my feet were blistered and my sandals were broken. I bought a new pair for five dollars and I wore those until they broke too. I bought another pair and another. Finally George said I couldn’t keep buying new pairs. I had to make the pair I had last. At that point I had a pair that cost about three dollars. The sandals stretched after a few days and fell off my feet as I walked. I took some string and tied them to my feet. When the string broke, I tied knots in it and tied my sandals back on and kept walking until the soles wore through to the ground. Why didn’t I bring a pair of damn Birkenstocks? I thought. But I’d wanted to look nice, you know, cute for the revolution.

This passage captures so much: Unferth’s mildly ironic, bemused attitude toward herself, her total misunderstanding as an 18-year-old of what she was in for on this trip, her boyfriend’s controlling tendencies, and the way we get a double-perspective on the book’s events: both the eighteen-year-old view and the older woman’s commentary on that view.