Cheryl Strayed

While Cheryl Strayed was in Minneapolis as part of her book tour for Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, which I posted about previously, I went to hear her twice, once for a reading and once for a reading/talk called “The Art of Memoir.”  I’m hoping to pass along to you some of what she had to say about the book, her writing life, and memoir.  She’s so great, such a pro, so well-spoken, and so generous in her answers to questions.  Given the book’s popularity, you can find about a zillion interviews with her and reviews of Wild on the Internet. She has links to her brilliant essays and to some of her Dear Sugar columns on her website.  Of course the best thing is to read the book!  http://www.cherylstrayed.com/index.htm

She said of the Wild hike, things in her life were coming undone when she saw a guidebook on hiking the PCT at the REI store here in Minneapolis.  Something about it spoke to her, even though she’d never gone backpacking. She had hiked and camped a lot but had never actually backpacked.  She saw the hike as a way of “walking herself backward – to be the person she was meant to be and the person her mother had raised her to be.”  She described Wild as being about the question “how do we bear what we can’t bear?”  She means not just her bearing her pack on the hike, which weighed too much for her to lift except for “hunching in a remotely upright position,” and which she nicknamed “Monster,” but also “how do I bear living in the world without my mother in it?”  She walked ninety-four days, which provides the backbone for the book, the external story of the hike itself. 

She said one of the challenges of writing was how to make monotony and tedium interesting – since many of her days were the same, spent in solitude, waking up, eating her cereal, hiking all day, making camp, eating her dinner, and sleeping.  In my opinion she definitely made the hike interesting every step of the way, by careful selection and structuring of events and people, interweaving the back story of losing her mother and losing her way as she spiraled into affairs, heroin, divorce, and unresolved grief.  As she said, “memoir is so much the art of selection.” 

Since I admire how well plotted and structured her memoir is, keeping us turning the pages to see what happens next and feeding us essential back story seamlessly, I asked Cheryl if she rearranged events or did they occur on the trail as they’re presented in the book.  I was curious about this, because it seemed so perfect the way things fell where they did. She said yes and no, that usually things happened where they did, but certainly with the back story she might rearrange when she thought of something and put it in where it fit best.  She was essentially telling two stories, one of the hike and one of everything that brought her to that.  She’s very skillful in making them both vivid, and seemingly natural in terms of flow, because, as she said, “memoirists are story tellers.”   She kept a detailed journal on the hike, and used it for specific details.  She did her best to research and verify things she could, including contacting some of the people she encountered on the trail.  But the memoir is how she remembers things. It’s her “subjective truth” of the experience.  She believes nonfiction writers have an obligation to the truth but it’s obvious when you read Wild that it is distilled and shaped, not just a factual (boring) record of what happened.  It’s written by a story teller. 

She believes that a memoirist’s job is not just to tell what happened, but to bring meaning to it.  It was a good decade after the hike before she understood what it meant.  “The book wouldn’t be half the book it is if I had written it a year after the trip.”  She had thought of herself as a fiction writer, and as an accidental memoirist, when she began writing essays.  She loves writing nonfiction, she said, because of the intensity of the voice.  “Nonfiction has the thinnest screen between writer and reader.”  Read More

Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Trail

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is an amazing and wonderful book.  It’s certainly one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  It’s beautifully written, so skillful in its craft, and so deep in its heart and feelings.   I found it totally engrossing, entertaining, and moving.

I think you would find it equally fine, but I do admit I’m prejudiced.  Cheryl was a student of mine in a graduate level fiction writing class in the fall of 1990, when she was senior at the University of Minnesota.  It was that following spring that Cheryl’s mother died of lung cancer, forty-five days after her shocking, unexpected diagnosis, at the age of forty-five.   When Cheryl came to my office to tell me, we both cried.  I have never seen anyone as heart-broken.  Even at twenty-two, Cheryl was one of the best students I have ever had. There was something so special about her, so bright and receptive, mature, warm, talented, and genuine. I felt honored to know her and call her a friend.  I recognized, as anyone would, that she was already on her way to being an exceptional writer.  Over the years she worked hard at developing her talent, with a commitment and sacrifice few people are able to muster.  She published some knockout essays, and in 2005 she published an excellent autobiographical novel, Torch, that deals with her mother’s death. But it is with Wild that she has achieved a spectacular success:  Knopf’s lead spring book; rave reviews in The New York Times, the NYTBR and just about everywhere else; a spread in Vogue; foreign rights sales in many countries; a big book tour; the movie rights bought by Reese Witherspoon; and #6 on the NYT nonfiction best seller list this week. None of this is a flux or some literary form of mass hysteria.  People are responding with such “wild” enthusiasm because the book actually deserves it.

The memoir braids the surface story of twenty-six year old Cheryl hiking 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone with the emotional back story of losing her mother, having her family disintegrate after her mother’s death, and her own subsequent “wilding,” in which she began having affairs, got into heroin, divorced her young husband whom she loved, and changed her name to Strayed, because, as she puts it:

“I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. I didn’t embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

She’s terrific at capturing the physical aspects of the hike itself, but what creates a lot of the poignancy and power of the book is Cheryl’s ability to capture her inner life, the exploration of the past that has brought her to this necessary journey alone and on foot. She convincingly tracks her internal movement along the trail from damaged and wounded to strong and whole.   Both journeys—the external and the inner one—are incredible feats of fortitude, effort, pain, and authenticity.  I certainly felt that I had traveled with her, so intimately does she let us into her life and self.  Her voice is so authentic and so at her service, her technical skills so highly developed, the pacing and structure so skillful, her persona so honest and appealing, the memoir is a joy to read.  It’s also a great model for memoir writers in how it weaves the forward action story with relevant, resonant passages of back story that give weight and meaning to that forward action.

It was four years after her mother’s death that Cheryl hiked the PCT.  The idea had come to her almost randomly, it seemed, in the midst of her own downward spiral, into sex and heroin.  She describes her experience with heroin:

“It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain, where it was unfortunate but essentially okay that my mother was dead and my biological father was not in my life and my family had collapsed and I couldn’t manage to stay married to the man I loved.

“At least that’s how it felt while I was high.

“In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.”

It is in the midst of this crack-up that she decides she has to walk the PCT alone. On the hike she understands the connection: Read More

Katherine Russell Rich

It was with sadness that I read of the death of Katherine Russell Rich.

I knew Kathy briefly in 2000 when we shared a house in Key West where we were attending the Seminar on Memoir.  I liked her a lot, and I greatly admired her memoir The Red Devil: to Hell with Cancer—and Back.  You can read about Kathy and her books in the Times obituary below.  I emailed her in 2008 when I was planning a trip to Udaipur, India, where Kathy had spent some time learning Hindi.  She was generous in sharing contacts in Udaipur and we shared stories about India, which fascinated us both.  She published a wonderful memoir called Dreaming in Hindi, about the experience of learning a foreign language, which tracked her sojourn in India along with information about linguistics and the effects of learning a second language on the brain.  She was brainy, brave, fun, and a fine writer.  I hate it that her voice is silenced.

Poet and freelance writer Karen Glenn, a friend of Kathy’s, wrote a poem about her that I love.  Karen knew Kathy in the 80s and 90s in NYC, when both of them were working for magazines. They had breast cancer at the same time, and according to Karen, Kathy helped shepherd her through the experience.  Kathy was a hero of sorts, though I don’t know if she’d call it that, to many women who had breast cancer.  She beat the odds many times.  As Karen noted, when Kathy said the things in the poem, her cancer was quiet, but of course it came back.

The Club

On the library bulletin board
I see a notice for a club
on facing death.  It isn’t for the dying
but a goad to the well
“to be actively alive as if
this year could be your last.”

Ten years ago, the doctor said,
“Karen, I won’t let you die.”
Until her words, I’d never thought
it was a possibility.  They talk
about “survivors” being brave.
I wasn’t.  I sleepwalked through it all—
chemo, cutting, throwing up, lost breast,
bald head.

My friend Kathy said that in her cancer year,
red was redder, breezes sweeter.
But when it was finally over,
she was glad not to have to appreciate
each and every damned flower.
Afterwards, she said, it brought her joy
to stand and curse a subway train
that passed us by.

–Karen Glenn
http://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/glenn_karen/index.html

The New York Times Obituary from April 7, 2012:

Katherine Russell Rich, Who Wrote of Battle With Cancer, Dies at 56

By MARGALIT FOX

Katherine Russell Rich, whose gritty, darkly comic memoir of her protracted battle with breast cancer became a beacon for other patients, died of the disease on Tuesday. She was 56, and against all predictions had lived with cancer for nearly a quarter-century.

The death was confirmed by a friend, Emma Sweeney.

In “The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer — and Back,”published in 1999, Ms. Rich chronicles finding a lump in her breast in 1988, when she was 32. An editor at GQ magazine at the time, she had ended her marriage just three weeks earlier. Read More

In Our Time

In my  February 6, 2012 post on my visit to Hemingway’s house in Cuba I referenced his short story “Indian Camp” from In Our Time, and quoted from it.  So I was interested when reading Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story, about her husband’s death and her traumatic plunge into widowhood (when suicide was much on her mind) to come upon this passage:

“Along with prose pieces by several students we discuss, in detail, rendering our way through the story line by line as if it were poetry, that early masterpiece of Ernest Hemingway—“Indian Camp.”  Four pages long, written when the author was only a few years older than these Princeton undergraduates, the stark and seemingly autobiographical “Indian Camp” never fails to make a strong impression on them.

How strange it is, how strangely comforting, to read great works of literature throughout our lives, at greatly different phases of our lives—my first reading of “Indian Camp” was in high school, when I was fifteen, and younger than the author; each subsequent reading has been revelatory in different ways; now this afternoon, in this new phase of my life, when it seems to me self-evident that my life is over, I am struck anew by the precision of Hemingway’s prose, exquisite as the workings of a clock. I am thinking of how, of all classic American writers, Hemingway is the one who writes exclusively of death, in its manifold forms; the perfect man of action is the suicide, William Carlos Williams once observed, and surely this was true of Hemingway. In a typical Hemingway story foregrounds as well as backgrounds are purposefully blurred, like the contours of his characters’ faces, and their pasts, as in those dreams of terrible simplicity in which stark revelation is the point, and there is no time for digressing.

At an Indian camp in Northern Michigan to which Nick Adams’s father, a doctor, has been summoned to help with a difficult childbirth, an Indian commits suicide by slashing his throat while lying in the lower bunk of a bunk bed, even as his wife gives birth to their child in the upper bunk. Hemingway’s young Nick Adams is a witness to the horror—before his father can usher him from the scene, Nick has seen him examining the Indian’s wound by ‘tipping’ the Indian’s head back.

Later, rowing back home from the Indian camp, Nick asks his father why the Indian killed himself and his father says, “I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

No theory of suicide, no philosophical discourses on the subject are quite so revelatory as these words. Couldn’t stand things, I guess.

How poignant it is to consider that Hemingway would kill himself several decades later, with a shotgun, at the age of sixty-one. “

"Joyce Carol Oates at Work" by Gloria Vanderbilt

Innocently browsing through our Minneapolis Star Tribune one morning (March 19), I came upon the “The Browser” column, which consists of short book reviews.  Suddenly my eyes grew large in horror.  Joyce Carol Oates has published a new novel.  Lord help us!  By some counts it’s her 38^th.  She’s sort of the literary equivalent of that California woman who gave birth to octuplets.

It’s called Mudwoman, which does not bode well.  Here’s the review:

MUDWOMAN

By Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco, 428 pages, $26.99)

Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates’ 38th novel, a sprawling tale that showcases both the strengths and weaknesses of Oates, 74, one of America’s greatest living novelists. Mudwoman is M.R. Neukirchen, a brilliant university president who is haunted by memories of the abuse inflicted by her birth mother before she was adopted by a genial Quaker couple. M.R.’s adulthood is plagued by nasty, intrusive strangers and disturbing events, many with ties to post-2001 U.S. politics and policies. Oates’ dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches, and in her cartoonlike minor ones, who are usually dangerously undereducated and undermedicated men with yellow teeth, beady eyes, dirty hands and bad grammar. But “Mudwoman,” which Oates’ publisher is touting as one of her “giant” novels, is deeply flawed. Characters you’re sure will become pivotal instead just disappear. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether Mudwoman is doing or dreaming, as in one nasty scene in which she dismembers a “conservative” colleague. And Oates’ moments of genius get lost in the time-hopping, dash-heavy narrative. Still, a failed novel by Oates would be a masterpiece by many another writer, and her chief themes — that demons denied or ignored inevitably will rise up to sabotage an individual or a nation and that human nature is rarely admirable (“What is man? A ball of snakes,” she quotes Nietzsche as saying in her epigraph) — are nothing to sling mud at. PAMELA MILLER, NIGHT METRO EDITOR

Reading this description of the novel, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or scream.

Now here’s a quote from A Widow’s Story, her memoir about the death of her husband and the experience of becoming a widow unexpectedly:

“Despite my reputation as a writer my personal life has been as measured and decorous as Laura Ashley wallpaper.”

Mudwoman vs. Laura Ashley.  It gives one pause.

One of the things I was interested in tracking in A Widow’s Story was what JCO revealed about her writing life and her imagination.  I’d love to know what it is that drives her, how she found the time to write as much as she has, and maybe most of all, why and how “Laura Ashley” produces so much violence, rape, incest, suicide, and psychological darkness out of an apparently measured and decorous personal life. Read More

Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith

In my first post on JCO’s A Widow’s Story I focused on her experience of trauma and grief following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith.

Now I want to look at another aspect of the memoir that fascinated me: her writing about her marriage and husband.

I don’t think you can ever really see inside other people’s marriages, which doesn’t mean we’re not interested in trying. I also think writing about one’s own marriage is a “challenge” best avoided! Given this memoir’s “situation” –Oates’ husband’s sudden death– and the “story” (to use Vivian Gornick’s terms)–her emotional, psychological and even physical survival in the year after this event, Oates would naturally have to write about Ray and the marriage. But some of what she wrote felt as if she were revealing maybe more than she intended or was in control of. Memoir requires truth, honesty, and exposure. But I think the best memoirs are ones in which the reader feels the writer has processed the material sufficiently and understands it deeply. I’m thinking, for example, of Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, about an incestuous relationship with her father. The material in that memoir seemed so digested by the author that it didn’t seem creepy. At least for me, I didn’t feel I was seeing things that the writer was unable to see herself. I was spared the unpleasant feeling of being a voyeur. At times in Oates’ memoir, I did feel uneasy, and even troubled by what she was revealing.

To her credit, JCO was willing to explore and expose things about her marriage and Ray in her efforts to understand them, and to tell the whole truth as best she could. It does make for fascinating reading, perhaps because it isn’t so digested and under control. There is no doubt, given the pro she is, that Oates made editorial decisions about what she wanted to include and what leave out. Undoubtedly she would have had opinions from her editor and others about the material too. I wonder if she has any regrets about it now.

Early in the memoir, pg. 8 in fact, Oates introduces the theme that will continue throughout the book, of feeling that she didn’t really know her husband, despite their having been married for forty-eight years:

“…we’d felt, through our long marriage, as if we’d only just met a few years before, as if we were ‘new’ to each other, still ‘becoming acquainted’ with each other; often we were ‘shy’ with each other; there were many things we did not wish to tell each other, or to ‘share’ with each other, in the way of individuals who are only just becoming intimately acquainted and don’t want to risk offending, or surprising.”

I found this fascinating and a little bewildering. On the one hand, she writes of her intense love for Ray and profound feelings of loss at his death. On the other hand, she returns often to this idea that she didn’t really know him:

“I am beginning to think Maybe I never knew him, really. Maybe I knew him only superficially—his deeper self was hidden from me.

“In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers—disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily/hourly basis!—it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?”

This struck me as a curious way to conduct a marriage. Apparently he didn’t know her any better than she knew him, because she kept so much to herself. As she notes, “…he did not read most of my fiction and in this sense it might be argued that Ray didn’t know me entirely—or even, to a significant degree, partially.” She muses on this:

“I regret it, I think. Maybe I do.

“For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness.

“But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.”

She wonders “…if I’d spent too much time in that other world—the world of my /the imagination—and not enough time with my husband.”

Given her stupendous output of writing, she must have spent almost every waking and unconscious moment in her imagination. It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. It appears that she and Ray were both people quite compatibly caught up in their literary endeavors, she as a writer and teacher, he as editor of the Ontario Review and the press they began together. They shared a domestic life that suited them well. There was apparently no conflict, and if there were crises in the marriage, they are not mentioned in the book. They had a settled, fixed, predictable marriage that was apparently very close in some ways, despite their not knowing quite a large part of each other’s inner lives.

They called each other “Honey.” Read More

A Widow's Story

I’ve finished reading Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story, though I’m far from being finished with it.  I don’t know when I’ve bookmarked a book more.  It’s full of striking passages that I want to revisit and share with you.  I felt riveted by the unexpected loss of her husband, and the vivid, impassioned depiction of her “posthumous” life, as she describes it, in the moments, hours, days, weeks and months following his death.  The memoir is first and foremost a purge of uncensored grief, but it’s also revealing, more so perhaps than she intended, about herself and her marriage, and it gives glimpses into her life as a writer.  I’m fascinated by JCO in part because of her mind-boggling prolificacy (a word I learned from the memoir).  From a quick scan of her bibliography, I count that she’s written 26 novels under her own name, 11 under the names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, 23 short story collections, 10 poetry collections, 8 novellas, 9 plays, 15 non-fiction books, 5 young adult novels, and 3 children’s books.   It is impossible to understand how this is even possible!

Oates’ husband of forty-one years, Raymond Smith, editor of the Ontario Review, was seventy-seven and quite fit when he came down with pneumonia.  Joyce recognized that something was “not-right” and drove him to the Princeton Medical Center.  In less than a week he would be dead from a secondary infection contracted in the hospital there.  She’s brilliant at capturing the nightmare roller coaster of his hospital stay, all the while expecting that he would be shortly discharged and life would resume.  At one point she gets a shocking phone call from the medical center that Ray’s heartbeat has accelerated and they haven’t been able to stabilize it.  Does she want extraordinary measures to be used to keep him alive?  At first she’s so stunned she can’t speak, but then is able to stammer Yes! Yes of course!  Do anything you can to save him.   A “sickening feeling of vertigo” overcomes her and she falls against the dining room table and onto the floor.  This is “the first unmistakable sign of horror, of helplessness—impending doom.”  In an italicized section at the end of the chapter, a device used throughout much of the memoir to highlight the insights of the seasoned widow looking back, she recounts that she acquired from this fall an “ugly bruise of the hue of rotted eggplant and of a shape resembling the state of Florida…” but the widow will almost forget this terrible phone call, “For soon there will be so much more to recall, from which mere fainting onto a hardwood floor will be no reprieve.”

The memoir proceeds in present tense, which gives it dramatic intimacy and immediacy.  Indeed, it is impossible not to identify with Oates as if the reader is living through her story also.  “Now into my life—as into my vocabulary—there has come a new, harrowing term: Telemetry.”  Ray is moved into this unit adjacent to Intensive Care, where over the next few days he appears to be recovering.  But E.coli sets in in his right lung, and Joyce will receive another shocking call at night, waking her from sleep, telling that her husband is in critical condition, and again asking if she desires extraordinary means to keep him alive.  Her husband is still alive, according to the voice on the phone, and in a panic she drives to the hospital.  “In the ghost-white Honda I am veering over the yellow line into the other lane, for some reason I am having difficulty gripping the steering wheel—my hands are bare, the wheel is cold yet the palms of my hands are slick with sweat.  I am having difficulty seeing, too—the road ahead, in the Honda’s headlights, looks smudged.”  We are caught in the same grip of fear and disbelief that she describes, even as we know the outcome.

What follows is as painful as anything I’ve read: the shock of finding her husband already dead, the disbelief of not hearing his voice saying Hi honey when she enters the room, her “pleading with him as a child might—‘Oh honey what has happened to you!—what has happened to you!—Honey? Honey?’”   Oates’ ability to render the dissolution of the self she has known, the sudden plunge into the totally unknown and terrifying universe of losing her husband, with the shock and disorientation that accompany it, is amazing and heartbreaking. Read More

Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction

Still looking for that perfect book for the reader in your life (or perhaps yourself)?  I recommend the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present  (the present being 2007 when it was published).  I had been looking for a good anthology of memoir and essays, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with this book.  I haven’t read all of the pieces—there are 50 of them—but the ones I’ve read are wonderful in the extreme, and the writers represented are most of the big names in nonfiction writing, with enough names I’m not familiar with to introduce me to some new writers.  This would make a great gift because it’s so chock-full of such a diversity of material and voices, from a variety of sources and the length of the pieces is so appealing—not too short, not too long.  Let me name drop a little to entice you:  Wendell Berry, Bernard Cooper, Annie Dillard, Tony Earley, Lucy Grealy, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Rhodes, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, David Foster Wallace, Joy Williams…

The authors are arranged alphabetically, and what made me buy the book in the first place was that Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” was the first piece.  I had first read this memoir in The New Yorker back in 1996 (I found the year in the acknowledgements) and believe me, I’ve read many things in The New Yorker over the thousand years or so that I’ve been getting it, most of which I’ve forgotten, but I had NEVER forgotten “The Fourth State of Matter.”  In fact, I think I probably have a copy of it moldering away somewhere in the “archives” in the basement.  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/24/1996_06_24_080_TNY_CARDS_000376447

I really can’t express what an incredible piece of writing this is.  Trust me, you will not read a finer piece of writing than this.  I don’t want to say too much about the subject matter, for fear of spoiling the experience for you, but I will say that among the many things I admire about it is the interweaving of various strands of a life, from her dying collie to her “vanished husband” to the squirrels living (uninvited) in her spare upstairs bedroom to her colleagues at the space physics department where she works—but this is so inadequate to capture the texture, layers, emotion and writing of the piece.  She writes so beautifully, and from such a profound experience, that you will never forget it either I bet.

Here’s a little sample: Read More

A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard

It’s been hard for me to organize my thoughts on A Stolen Life, the memoir by Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age eleven by the sexual predator Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy, remaining with them for eighteen years, and having two children by him. But you probably know the facts. 

Not only has it been hard for me to organize my thoughts, it’s been hard for me to know why I’m having such trouble.  It may be because Jaycee’s experience is so mind-blowing, and the book so unmitigated by time and sophistication, that, well, my mind is blown.  It certainly feels that way.  I’m taking the liberty of referring to Jaycee by her first name.  She is still young, early thirties and she seems young in the writing.  In reading the memoir, I felt I knew her personally.  There is no pretense, no “art,” and very little if any distance in the telling.  What there is is intelligence, honesty, searching, freshness, and goodness.  The story she tells is incomprehensible and yet she lays it out straightforwardly, candidly, bravely, without self-pity and with calm sanity.  I found it an amazing and fascinating book, and I’m glad I read it, though I wondered if I could or should when she describes being raped a week after she’s abducted.

If there was ever an appropriate title for a memoir, A Stolen Life is it.  It’s hard to grasp just how much Garrido stole from her.  Everything, one might say.  And yet it is inspiring to read how she struggled not only for basic survival, but to hold on to hope, love, and growth in the direst of circumstances.  And having read the book, I’m convinced she succeeded. 

One of the things I found fascinating was the study of human nature her story provides. Here were these three individuals bound together: Jaycee, Phillip, and Nancy.  Through them you get a glimpse of a mind-boggling range of human behavior.   

Read More

Let's Take the Long Way Home

My friend over at the wonderful blog Narrative, Richard Gilbert (http://richardgilbert.wordpress.com/) called my attention to the memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell, which he admires greatly, so I read it while I was on vacation in Boston and Maine in August. I’d glad I did.  He has several posts on Caldwell’s use of metaphor and you’ll enjoy reading them, along with seeing a videotape of her commenting on writing the book and reading from it, which was moving. 

I had never been to Boston and I booked a $100.00 a night room at the Sheraton on Priceline.  What a deal!  And when our room wasn’t available by 3:00, they upgraded us to a suite on the 26^th floor with a wonderful view of the Charles River and MIT on the other bank.  I hadn’t realized that Let’s Take the Long Way Home takes place in Cambridge, and that the two women friends in the book do a lot of rowing on the Charles River.  So it seemed fitting to start the book while having that particular view.

It’s a sad book, about the friendship between the author and Caroline Knapp, who wrote the memoirs Drinking: a Love Story, and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, and who died at the age of forty-two of lung cancer.  The two women had at the least writing, rowing, swimming, training their dogs, and overcoming alcoholism in common, and theirs was apparently an extraordinary friendship.  I was particularly interested in the parts about dogs, being a dog owner with an untrained, untrainable dog, which they would have found unacceptable if not unbearable, and with Caldwell’s description of her alcoholism and her recovery from it, which gave me a much greater understanding of the disease. 

But where the book really gripped me was in its depiction of grief.  There are many memoirs on the loss of a partner or loved one—notably Joan Didion’s and Joyce Carol Oates’ about losing their husbands—but I found Caldwell’s ability to describe what she experienced in losing someone she deeply loved particularly eloquent.  Her writing sounded the depths of loss in my own life—both deaths already experienced, and those waiting in the wings to take center stage.  Such loss is unavoidable; it comes to us all.  But it takes a writer of Caldwell’s gifts to give words to those universal feelings and in doing so, to provide us with an understanding of our own, often inchoate feelings.  To have them so beautifully and authentically named, expressed, is a balm and a blessing.    

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