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Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memoir. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Inheritance: a Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro


This memoir, which is in four parts, is Dani Shapiro's most intimate memoir to date. Shapiro who has always considered herself her father's daughter is devastated to learn that he is not her biological father.

Despite clues along the way, nothing clicks until she takes a DNA test. She expected to find that she is 100% Jewish but the test reveals something else altogether. She is biologically related to her mother but not to her father. 

Gradually, more details come to light. Before Shapiro was born, her parents had visited an infertility clinic known to mix sperm. Though she hopes her parents had not concealed anything from her, it becomes obvious they knew she was donor-conceived. 

Shapiro claims she had always known something was amiss. For Shapiro, who was devoted to her father, but always felt at odds with her family, the DNA results answer many troubling questions. 
The DNA results opens old wounds, leaving Shaprio completely unmoored. 

She describes how lost she feels in poetic language:

"I am the black box, discovered years--many years--after the crash. The pilots, the crew, the passengers have long been committed to the sea. Nothing is left of them. Fathoms deep, I have spent my life transmitting the faintest signal...I am also the diver who has discovered the black box...I had been looking for it all my life without knowing it existed."

Eventually, she has a meeting with her biological father whom she strongly resembles. They are brought together through the magic of social media.

Shapiro digs deeper, investigating the way cryobanks currently operate. She interviews dozens of donor-conceived individual who feel just as exiled and lost as she does.

As she forges deeper relationships with her biological family, however, Shapiro begins to see everything in a new light: as a blessing.  

Shapiro, who was raised as an orthodox Jew, is peppered with Jewish phrases and expressions. Her identity is still firmly Jewish, even if she is half Christian.

She puts all of her previous writings in perspective, realizing nearly all of her works were about family secrets.

Though she gives her social father "kol hakavod" (all the honor), she comes to cherish her biological one as well.

Shapiro's story is so important in this age when DNA kits are becoming more and more recreational. As more and more individuals have genetic testing done, more connections will be made. The likelihood of family secrets becoming accidently unearthed--as Shapiro's had--will increase over time.

Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit


This remarkable book of essays, which critics liken to a set of Russian nested dolls, are interconnected musings on many topics--maternal love, child abandonment, memory loss, illness, fairytales, labyrinths, Buddhism, the Arctic, and of all things, apricots.

Solnit has a poetic turn-of-phrase which makes these essays extremely enjoyable. Scallops and sea urchins dragged from the ocean floor are "bright like internal organs laid bare by surgery or butchery."

In some ways, these essays are show how interconnected everyone's lives--their life stories--are. In the end, though, these essays are also a deeply moving memoir of one particular woman's life--Solnit's.

In her personal essays, Solnit divulges her difficult relationship with her mother. Strained as a child and young adult, the mother daughter bond grows stronger as Solnit cares for her mother's medical needs. 

Solnit reveals her own narrow brush with death--breast cancer--and her courageous attempt to start anew. 

Thursday, May 28, 2015

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (part 2)

The next stage is hunting. Macdonald loses, she says, her humanity while watching Mabel hunt. Although she has been an animal lover all her life, she enjoys the hawk's triumphs. 

Ironically, Macdonald says she regains her humanity by mercifully killing the prey that Mabel would have eaten live.

Macdonald's success in training her goshawk is punctuated by White's unsuccessful attempts to train his.

Then, one day, the hawk inexplicably attacks Helen. 

The injuries gives Helen several key realizations that are further affirmed when she speaks at her father's memorial service.

She had been losing herself--her humanity--while training the goshawk. 

What I liked best about this memoir is the honest description of  a tense human-animal relationship. The literary analyses, the historical asides, and Macdonald's astute discussion of depression and grieving process make this work even more significant.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (part 1)


Though she is an expert who has trained many raptors, MacDonald feels compelled to train a goshawk after her father's death. Known to be the most difficult of all to train, the goshawk is a suitable challenge that allows her to grieve and escape from the world.

MacDonald's father, a photojournalist, viewed the world through his camera lens. He taught Helen to be a watcher and that is what she does while training hawks. 

For the first few weeks she "watches" them; she allows herself to become invisible while feeding them from gloved hands.

The next stage is "manning" the hawk. Manning the hawk means uncovering its head in public. Up to this point, the hawk wear a hood in public.

In this wildly original work of non-fiction, MacDonald also confronts her younger self and her disdain for fellow hawk-trainer and legendary author, T.H. White.

His loneliness mirrors her own though she does not appear to recognize this. As an adult, MacDonald comprehends White's troubled soul and his loneliness. 

MacDonald is an academic so much of the writing comes across an a beautifully-written academic essay. She is also a poet which explains the work's formidable imagery: "The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away."

Since she is also historian, MacDonald often engages in interesting asides, like her discussion of the Pastoral movement that occurred in Britain in the 1930s. 

Mostly, though, she shares her triumphs and failures as an austringer. Though she trains Mabel to land on her fist, inexplicably, her goshawk stops doing it consistently. MacDonald feels she has failed her hawk.

Much of this non-fiction treatise reads like feral therapy. MacDonald is afraid to let Mabel loose of the creance as she is supposed to do: "I'm convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever." 

This isn't a bond she takes lightly. During her time of grief, she has frequent angry outbursts. She finds it particularly hard to learn to trust again:

 "Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it's not a thing that's easy to do when you've lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust." 

(continued)




Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate

 


Through The Narrow Gate is an intriguing memoir by a woman who spent seven years in a convent and who later became a pre-eminent writer and speaker on religous topics. Determined to find God, Armstrong leaves a comfortable life in Birmingham, England for an austere convent at 17.  She struggles with homesickness, the weekly baths, the sewing, the "rule of silence" and other strict rules. She is also not allowed, for instance, to read for pleasure, leave the convent, or write freely to her family.

Despite being called "useless" by the Novice Mistress, Armstrong or "Sister Martha" (as she has been renamed), soldiers on. Unfortunately for her, Armstrong has entered the convent before Vatican II. Her illness, epilepsy, is seen as a failure to discipline her emotions. Armstrong also find that her active mind is constantly at odds with religious life. After she enters Oxford so that she can become a teaching nun, she faces even greater turmoil. Her desire to obey the order is constantly at odds with her desire to study literature.

Surprisingly honest in her willingness to examine her mistakes, Armstrong also never shies away from asking hard questions about her religous vocation. After leaving the convent, Armstrong then went on to write about the commonalities she sees among various faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. She won the $100,000 TED prize in 2008 and drew up a Charter for Compassion that was signed by dignataries from around the world. Those who are interested in Karen Armstrong's memoir may also be interested in her second memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Lisa Jones' Broken: A Love Story

Wanting to learn more about Stan Addison's methods of gentling wild horses and his healing abilities, Lisa Jones, a freelance journalist, comes to Wind River Indian Reservation. Jones had originally featured the quadriplegic Native American horse gentler in a Smithsonian magazine article. Broken does more than chronicle his Addison's life, which is amazing in itself. Broken aslo reveals Lisa's emotional life--the psychological hangups that have precluded her from committing to anything or anyone. Lisa bravely reveals all her vulnerabilities and honestly explores her deepening spirituality. If you liked Eat, Pray, Love, you will definitely like this memoir that takes a sometimes bohemian woman into one of the most broken places in America. Broken explores the notion of God, race, healing, and redemption. All in all, it would make an excellent book discussion book.
Review by Chantal Walvoord

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